00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 235, "The Beautiful Mess." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Alright, hello. Welcome to the podcast today. Glad to have you here with me. It's the day after Christmas, right? I hope you all had a wonderful holiday getting to do things that were meaningful for you. I got to spend the day with my husband and with three of his children and a daughter-in-law and two grandkids. My kids are all back in Utah and we're heading out there for New Year's, which will be fun, but it was a different Christmas for me for sure, not have my kids around, but that's what life does sometimes, right? It's part of the beautiful mess we're going to be talking about today. 

00:58 

Really quickly, if you are interested in the possibility of joining one of my Mastermind groups, which are really just a deep dive discussion group about certain topics, make sure that you are on my email list. You can go to tanyahale.com and on there you can go to the contact tab at the top and scroll down a little bit and there's a place where you can sign up for my "weekend win" email. On that, you will make sure that you will not miss an opportunity to find out what the Masterminds are that are coming up and when they're going to start. I'm looking at starting them probably around the middle of January, although I have not solidified that information yet, working on it as we speak. That being said, we're going to jump into today's podcast. 

01:45 

We're going to be talking about the beautiful mess. In our Sunday School classes last week, we were talking about what we learned about Christ in our study of the Old Testament this last year. I fell in love with the comment that someone made that the Old Testament is just so messy. The other scriptures show some challenges, they talk about things, but they don't show the messiness of life the way that the Old Testament does. In the Old Testament we see completely dysfunctional families. We see people struggling to follow God in serious ways. We see prophets pushed to the limit and prophets even outright disobeying God, prophets who don't want to be prophets and yet they are. We see all kinds and yet we also see that even in all of these kinds of messes, God does not give up on His people. We see a God who always has His hand reached out, who never turns His back on the covenant He's made, even though the people are constantly turning their backs on the covenants that they've made. 

02:51 

The rawness of the Old Testament in showing us such difficulties accompanied by such grace was just a really nice change of pace for me this year. Because I think sometimes it can feel like we go to church and everyone is on their best behavior. They're all dressed nice and all the families seem to be loving and kind to each other, and no one is gossiping, and no one is talking much about their family struggles, their marital discord, their addictions, or other pain. And yet, life is messy and it is meant to be messy, and all of us are swimming in messy at one time or another. 

03:26 

So, let's talk about the messy for a bit today. Here are just some of the messy parts of life that I've encountered this past year, some in my personal life, and the rest in working with clients. Here we go, here's a good list: Adult children who completely disassociate themselves and don't want anything to do with their parents. Drug and alcohol abuse and addiction. Defiant teenagers. Both husbands and wives having affairs. Children angry at their parents' decisions. Spouses being emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive. Disconnected marital relationships. Partners, spouses who become roommates instead of lovers. Serious financial situations, unemployment. Questioning a lifelong faith. A spouse questioning a lifelong faith. A spouse leaving a lifelong faith. Infertility and miscarriages and stillborn children. Death of a loved one, whether it's expected or unexpected. Suicide of a loved one. Sibling tensions. Bullying at work. Family illness. Separation and/or divorce and all of the challenges that come along with that. There is just so much in our lives that bring challenges for us. So many things that take our nicely ordered, simple, and easy lives and make them messy. 

04:56 

The messy is difficult to be sure. These kinds of things are hard to wrap our heads and our hearts around. It's painful to see loved ones hurting, to feel disconnected from people we ache to be connected to, to see harmful behavior being engaged in by those we love so desperately, to lose people we can't imagine our lives without. And yet these are the things that life is made of. Interspersed with moments of joy and satisfaction and contentment and peace, it's always a mix of both. We call this the 50-50 of life. So our lives were created to be a challenge, to be a mess. And how do I know? Because every person I have ever known or heard of has a messy life. It's interesting to me that we have this morbid obsession with perfectionism, thinking that we should always do everything right, as should everyone else around us, and that we should be able to control all the circumstances so that we never make mistakes or create difficulty for our lives. 

05:58 

And yet, God created us to be in the beginning stages of our creation. The biggest and most important part of His plan, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, was put in place precisely because God knew creating our life would be messy. He knew that we would need to circle back around and try things again and again. He knew that we would need to learn to manage our human minds around life's circumstances and other people and how they show up. He knew that we would act and speak before we think, that we would say hurtful and insensitive things, that we would struggle to love our spouses and our children and our parents and our siblings sometimes. Because we are in the beginning stages of our creation. God knew we would make mistakes. He knew we would mess up. Because really, moving forward and making mistakes is how we create ourselves, how we grow into the people we are capable of becoming. He created us to be imperfect. Then He sent us down here to an imperfect world that is in a constant state of degeneration, where we are surrounded by imperfect things of the world. We're born in imperfect circumstances to imperfect parents, maybe just one imperfect parent, maybe to parents who neglected or abandoned us or parents who loved us but were just so humanly imperfect that they made a lot of mistakes. We were surrounded by other imperfect people, siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and neighbors and friends, all who are in different stages of their creation, all who are still figuring it out. And in all of this imperfection, God does not expect us to be perfect. I'm pretty convinced He expects us to be humans, to struggle, to make the messes even bigger than they originally were. More and more, I'm pretty sure that all of this imperfection is a foundational element of His plan for us as His children. 

08:04 

Because only in this imperfection can we grow and progress and continue on in our own creation story. If we were perfect, there would be no need for this earthly experience, no need to learn how to set aside our pride and put on a cloak of humility. There would be no need to learn how to be aware of our own faults and weaknesses, and learn the mind management and discipline necessary to grow into a stronger and more conscious version of ourselves. And the struggle that these things demand? It is the very thing that helps us to become stronger, more aware and more wise. The struggle through the mess is what creates in us the person that God wants and needs us to become. The mess is what creates the character that brings us closer to God. 

08:55 

As my husband and I talked about this concept yesterday, I loved his insight that it is in the mess that God is able to show forth his miracles. Isn't that amazing? The miracles of God are in the mess. As I look at my life, the mess of 24 years of a dysfunctional marriage, the patterns of behavior that I engaged in that were hurtful to both my husband and my children, the seemingly constant struggle to try and figure things out, to understand what was wrong...I see that in the struggle, I became the person God needed me to be. All of that mess ended in a divorce, which seemed like the end of the world, the end of my world at least, right? And yet there is a lot of beauty that has come from those ashes. I am now doing a work that I genuinely feel called to do. I coach a lot of women and some men who are working through their own mess of divorce and family dysfunction. And because of my journey, I can understand certain elements of their mess. I can have a greater measure of compassion and empathy for what they're going through. I truly believe that me getting to a place where I can help others in this way necessitated me going through my own mess. I believe the path God needed me to walk included all of the mess of my previous marriage and divorce and the struggle to reconnect emotionally with my children afterwards. Because that path has led me here, which I honestly feel is exactly where I'm supposed to be. And that messy path led me to down a path of growth and development, which brought me into such a sweet current marriage situation that is almost the exact opposite of what I previously experienced. 

10:52 

The mess is the way. I really believe this. Heart and soul, I believe this. And to be sure, my mess is not over. I have an incredible opportunity to engage in this amazing marriage, and yet it comes with messy challenges as well. And these challenges are pushing me to explore my newfound capacity to love in a more beautiful, different way. This mess brings up fears and insecurities that I didn't know existed before, and it leaves me astonished sometimes at my pettiness and my pain. I find myself struggling to dig through the mess and find and hold on to the things that I can control, which the things that I can control are what I choose to think, how I choose to feel, and how I choose to show up. This current mess is beautiful in its own right. I feel that during my marriage and divorce in single years, I was picking the low hanging fruit, meaning things in my behavior that were probably so obvious to everyone around me, but I wasn't aware of yet. There was a lot of low hanging fruit, I'm just saying. And I picked, and I picked, and I picked. And now I feel that the low hanging fruit has been picked. I feel like now it's necessary for me to start climbing up the tree, to get to the higher hanging fruit. Thoughts and behaviors and attitudes that are more subtle, but that are still indicative of the person that I don't want to be. But I also feel that my willingness to climb the tree, to find the fruit, to engage in the mess, is paying big dividends. 

12:39 

It is hard sometimes not to lash out at someone who I think is unfair. Absolutely it is. Because in my brain, I think that this mess isn't mine, it's theirs. But isn't that funny? Of course it's mine. It's mine to learn how to be the person I want to be, to navigate my own thoughts and feelings. It's mine to show up the way that I want. This is the work. The mess is the work. And I love to call this a beautiful mess. And this comes from the music group Diamond Rio has a song that they call "Beautiful Mess." And I feel that this is what we're engaging in every single day. A beautiful mess. The mess of humanity, of working through our weaknesses, our faults, our insecurities and our doubts. The mess of feeling difficult emotions like grief and anger and resentment and envy and pain. The mess of feeling as though things are unfair and the other person doesn't deserve our forgiveness. The mess of being scared to be vulnerable and to be seen and heard and known. And yet it is in this mess that God works His miracles of creating in us the person we are capable of becoming. In this mess, God sees our possibility and He presents us with the exact circumstances we need in order to see what we need to about ourselves, to know how to move forward in the creation of our best selves. We get to join with God in this creation. We are matter unorganized and God is coming into organize us. He is showing us what we're capable of. He is preparing us for greater things. 

14:28 

In the thick of my challenging marriage and divorce I did not know that such a sweet situation awaited me. But God did. He knew that that that mess would bring me to this, which again is also messy, and providing me with new opportunities to create myself, but such an amazing situation. Check out your own mess, my friends. How is it an opportunity to create the you that God knows? How is it an opportunity to grow into another version of yourself that will bring you closer to your divine possibility? How is your beautiful mess the perfect place? And then I would like to challenge us to begin sharing part of our mess with others. So many of us think that we are the only ones with messy lives. One of the many things I have learned from coaching is that everyone has a mess, and sometimes those messes are so messy, and we often don't see others' messes, so we feel alone in our struggle. But let's open up the dialogue, let's share a little bit more, when appropriate, and learn to rely on each other more for support. Let's move into acceptance of our mess and other people's messes, and see them as opportunities to create our greatest selves, rather than a declaration of how unrighteous or unworthy someone is. 

15:58 

Because our messes don't have much to do with worthiness or righteousness, if at all. I think they have to do with growth and progression and movement and opportunity. When we judge the messes around us, whether they be ours or someone else's, we are working against God's creation of us, which is us in our greatest possibility. When we can learn to show up with love and kindness and acceptance of other people's messes, we are creating in us what we are meant to be. And also, when we can learn to show up with love and kindness and acceptance of our own messes, we are creating in us what we are meant to be. Messes are what life is made of. And messes are where God does some of His greatest work and miracles. The work and miracle of creation. Embrace the mess, my friends. God bless and may your beautiful mess bring you closer to God in this upcoming year. I love growing up. So grateful for the blessing of learning and understanding and growing and being created into what God needs me to be. Thanks for joining me here. Wish you all the best as we close up this year. And 2023, here we come, right? More of the same. More of the beautiful mess. We got it. See you there. Bye. 

17:39 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.