Are you a neat freak? Maybe you like everything nice and orderly. If so messiness represents chaos and confusion in your life. If that’s the case, anyone who is messy can be an annoyance. Children with their dirty hands, teenagers leaving all their stuff on the ground, or adults who drop their crumbs everywhere are a threat to your sanity. King Solomon tells us today that life wouldn’t be the same without the blessed messes in our life.
Proverbs 14:4
Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.
An Abundant Harvest
This is one of the humorous proverbs, but it packs a powerful punch. King Solomon is explaining an essential point about life: It’s messy. A farmer needs the strength of an ox to plow the fields and pulls the carts at harvest, but he has to deal with the mess the ox brings. An Ox does not care if it makes a mess. All it cares about is eating. It will “make deposits” whenever it needs to, and it doesn’t pay attention to where it does it. The farmer accepts that fact because the strength of an ox is unparalleled.
Difficult Dilemma
If you want to be successful in whatever you are doing, you have to understand it’s not going to be easy and it won’t always be neat and orderly. There is a trade-off. This is especially true when it comes to working with people. You need the help of certain people, but they bring baggage that is difficult to deal with. You have to choose to deal with the drama or not. On the one hand, you have a worker who produces impressive results, yet he offends everyone around him. Do you keep him or get rid of him?
A Blessed Mess
There are some facts of life that we need to understand. You will have to learn how to deal with difficult people. Certain messes come with the territory. If you are more about avoiding messes, then you will never see the success you desperately desire. A farmer accepts that an ox is messy because he realizes he can’t live without its power. We need to accept people for how they are because Jesus accepts us with all of our faults.