A Fresh Perspective

This happened in July.  I took pictures because I wanted to remember this moment.  When I looked at the mess you are about to see, I thought:  this is a pictorial representation of our life.  It's a big disastrous mess.  

This is our storage unit, partially unpacked.  All our worldly goods, minus the junk at grandma and grandpa's house, scattered about the parking lot and storage unit.

We needed to find my high school diploma (high school diploma!!) so I could legally register our homeschool with the state of North Dakota.  That meant an afternoon dig through the storage unit.  Digging through the storage unit meant we would find mold on the lower 6 inches of any furniture resting on the floor of the unit.  Couches, tables, chairs, bookcases, etc.

The mold sent our friend Sheila to Walmart for paper towels and bleach cleaner.  Then we scrubbed as much mold as we could from the furniture, let it sit in the sun, put it back in storage and crossed our fingers for what we would find when we would someday move everything out of storage.

The kids played in the car

read books

and ran around  adding to the mayhem.

The guys hauled furniture and helped me dig through boxes.  And thanks to Nate's genius digging, we found the diploma. Then Isaiah was hurriedly fed as I sat atop a rubbermaid bin and then the kids and I zoomed off to meet Aunt Evie and her daughter Kristi while the guys loaded our junk back into the storage unit.  

That was a hard day.  Hot, frustrating, discouraging, overwhelming.  All I could see was disaster and mess everywhere I looked.  

I cried.  

A lot.

Today when I pulled those pictures up on the screen to blog I saw something I didn't see in July.  The sky.

It's perfect.   Beautiful.  Crisp.  

 How could I have missed that?  It seems so obvious now.  

His beauty.  The beauty He's created. His goodness on display.

Even in our messiest, most despairing, faithless places, He shows up brilliant, beautiful, wrapping the mess in His grace and glory and goodness.

Sometimes it's just hard to see in the moment.  

I'm grateful for a second chance to frame a hard day with His kind goodness.

I'm also happy to report that our bleach scrubbing efforts on that sunny afternoon did away with almost all of the mold.  When the furniture came out of the unit two months later, there was almost no mold to be found.