Your mess is your message.

I heard this on a podcast and quickly wrote it in the notes on my phone. I’ve often felt like I’m unqualified to lead this tribe of inspired folks because I don’t have enough of life figured out.

My coach told me a story of a girl traveling with her mentor to lead a seminar. On the plane, the mentor is reading the book that they’re headed to speak on. She asked him how many times he’d read the book and he said this was his first time. Shocked, she asked how they’d be able to present on it if he hadn’t even read the full book yet. He said, “You only have to be one chapter ahead.”

Since hearing this story, I’ve played that statement over and over in my mind. You only have to be one chapter ahead. You — or I — don’t have to have it all figured out to be able to lead and share and encourage other people. You only have to have identified step one.

Your mess is your message.

If I waited until I had it all figured out to share here, we’d have radio silence. If my mess is my message though, I can talk for days!

My mess changes on the regular. This time last year, my mess was the near crippling anxiety I felt about moving again.

In 2019, I had just moved from a 100 year old house I spent months remodeling for myself because the parish bought it to build a fire station on that lot. I only got to live there for 6 months. In a 6 month period, I lived in three different houses and was legit homeless for over a week. I crashed at friends’ houses and with Zach when he didn’t have the kids and lived from a suitcase in my trunk. In the four years before that, I’d gone home to 7 different places due to natural disaster and divorce, some things in my control and some not.

At the time, I just rolled with the punches and made it work. It was months later that I realized how much this instability had affected me. When we first started talking about making the move to where we are now, I was panicked. My poor heart wasn’t ready to be uprooted again. I’d only been still for a year. I was excited about what another move would mean and yet crippled with fear.

It meant that I was going to live in the country again, for the first time in sixteen years. It meant I was going to have way less reliable internet, and I like to work from home often. It meant we were going to squeeze our two households into one smaller house.

More importantly though, it meant that Zach and I would be getting serious about marriage. It meant I had to face my insecurities about marriage from having gone through a divorce. It meant I had to learn to live with two children in my house, when I’ve never lived with children full time before.

It meant I had to face my fears of these kids not loving me or not wanting me around.

This move wasn’t simply relocating to another house. It meant so much more and thinking about all of those extra things left me an anxious mess for months.

If my mess is my message, this was my message one year ago. My message today is eerily similar, yet so different.

Today, I’m pregnant and feeling all of the anxiety that comes with bringing a child into the world. I worry about things in a practical sense — will this baby be healthy? Will I be able to bring him into the world safely? Will he have all ten fingers and all ten toes?

I worry about this pregnancy in a more abstract sense too — how will bringing a new little one into our home affect our routines and relationships? Will our marriage adjust to having a child in the house full time? Will the other kids respond well to having a half-brother? Will they still get enough attention and still feel loved and important? What’s postpartum going to be like with everything else we have going on? Will Zach love his new kid as much as his current ones?

I worry about these things while we crunch numbers on building a new house, just one year after making the move to #magnoliaridgeLA. We hope and pray that everything comes together, and we end up with a beautiful home that’s big enough for all of us to fit in more comfortably. But it’s still too soon to tell.

Reality is though, this home — no matter what size it is or how beautiful it is or isn’t — won’t be ready before this baby arrives. This means we’re bringing a little one and all of his supplies to our small, 2 bedroom/1 bath house for some time. This brings with it its own host of troubles to navigate. I am not exaggerating when I say that something will have to be moved out to even fit a bassinet. And that bassinet might have to go in the living room. It’s far from ideal.

This also means I won’t have a nursery to decorate before our little guy gets here. While this lands pretty low on the scale of life’s big problems, I’m still a little bummed as I come to terms with the fact. It’s something that I’ve had to mourn more than I expected I would. This is my first child, one that I’ve waiting years for, and literally nothing is as idyllic as I dreamed it would be. That’s ok. But it’s a lot to process.

My mess currently is that I’m still working to build strong relationships with two children that weren’t born to me. We’re still working out the kinks of a new marriage. We have a new puppy that refuses to potty train on our schedule. The way we work has changed tremendously this year and frankly, I miss some of my old routines.

All of this comes on the heels of hurricanes and heartbreak and heart scares and record-breaking ice storms and I feel like I have whiplash from trying to press on through it all.

So much of the stress on my life currently is from beautiful things. I’ve always wanted to be a mom and I’m so thankful for this baby growing inside of me. We want to build a bigger house on this dream property. We wanted to get married and navigate everything that melding our two lives would mean.

Even though much of it is welcomed, it’s still frightfully hard to navigate. It’s still complicated. It still takes so much energy, when I’m struggling through this pregnancy as it is.

But, my mess is my message.

My message, just like this time last year, is that life is full of changes and sometimes you have to take blind steps in faith. It means you have to face your fears in order to chase your dreams. That things seldom go as planned.

It means that you’re not alone in whatever has you worrying yourself sick right now. Whether you’re thinking about whether or not to change jobs or how you’ll have that hard conversation, you’re not alone.

My hope in sharing a glimpse of my mess with you today is that you feel encouraged to know that you’re not the only one living in a state of uncertainty. I’m back in therapy and working to navigate all of this with as much grace as possible. (That should really read “with as few breakdowns and outbursts as possible!“) Outside of that, I’ll be doing a lot of things in faith during this season. I’ll be simply putting one foot in front of another and hoping for the best. My charge to you today is to listen to your heart, follow your intuition, and make moves when you feel led. It’s going to be scary and hard and we can do it anyway. We can do it together.