Beautiful and messy 51

It must have been in and around 1pm. It had been a fairly manky morning and early afternoon but as I pulled up to get the tyres changes on the car the sun started poke out from behind a big dirty grey cloud. 5live was grumbling in the background with the Saturday pundits dissecting Liverpool’s new risky transfer strategy. Like the radio, I too was grumbling. One, about the money I was about to part with for the tyres and two, about the above mentioned transfer policy. Still, in Kenny we trust.

I was about twenty yards from the busy tyre centre when one of the staff, covered in oil and general tyre-ness came over asking how he could help. I let him know I’d appreciate as quick and as cheap a job as he could do. “Roll her into bay 3” he chuckled in a thick and broad Belfast accent. I miss that drawl through the year.

As I flicked the screen of my phone looking to pass the time the guy kept making conversation with me as he floated from car to car in the bustling centred. My car, the weather and the buzz about the place were first on the list. Something inside me the prompted me to put the phone in the pocket and be present in the moment. I need to do that more often. Be present in more moments. Too often I, in fact my generation, are barricaded behind our technology when life can be birthing and growing right in from of us. Too often I don’t think we realise it.

He noticed the Dublin registration on the car and asked, “what has you down there?” “A job took me down there nearly four years ago now, I’m the youth worker in a church.” There is always a funny (not ha ha funny) breather in a conversation when people find out the answer to that question. With one eye shut and his hand acting as a visor over his face due to the sun he blurted, “Ah mate that’s cool you know, so it is.”

He continued on, relaying the information on how he was a Christian when he was younger but his working environment had been a pull on him and how he had not been “arsed with God or church or nothin’ in the last wee while.” He kept going, letting me know that he hadn't fallen out with God, but felt that he was a million miles from where God would want him to be.

Just as I started to pathetically encourage him to a place of understanding that God wants us to respond to Him and His love regardless of past, present or future mess, his boss grabbed him to do something in the boisterous workshop.

It hurt that he felt that way, but man I loved how he was so open and honest about what was stifling him in pursuing the best relationship that he was created to have. I wish we were more like that in church so we could pray better for each other. That's for another day though.

As he rushed off to the overpriced and overrated X5 in bay 4, a guy the size of my house (and adjoined garage)  told me to back the car out of the bay 3 and head into the reception to “square up”. I wasn’t going to argue. He was a beast. Even more so than me.

As I came out of the reception I looked about to see if the guy was around to thank him for helping me out and to see if there was any steam left in the conversation that we had been having. He was occupied so I gave manly shout of thanks into the workshop and got into the car.

As I was driving, it hit me that the lad’s hang ups about having a relationship with his God were actually fairly similar to a place that I keep journeying through myself. And when I say journeying I mean that I get beyond the point and then can get sucked back there quiet easily.

For the last 16 months or so I have been trying to live out Psalm 51. That particular Psalm is how David communicated with God after the Prophet Nathan had pointed out just how much of a mess he had made. FYI, in case you aren’t familiar, David in his fleshy weak, sinful humanness got his good mate’s wife pregnant and the subsequently sent that said mate off to be killed in war (with other messy acts in between).

Psalm 51 itself is beautiful. Beautiful in the sense David recognises just what he has done, which we all need to do but more so because he realises how big, good and full of grace his God is. And what’s more than that is he realises that God’s beautifully aggressive grace is the only thing that can fix him up. And when that happens our patterns and lives change direction.

But there is another reason that this Psalm has been big for me. And it is because it was instant, straight away. It was David’s knee jerk reaction. It is thought that Nathan along with many others were still in the room when David wrote Psalm 51.

For many a year, even as a Christian, my mentality was the same as the chap who was helping me with my tyres. I felt that after I screwed up (and that happens regularly and in many different ways) that I had to go through some period of time that would do some sort of cleansing before I could have a chat with my Father. I’d literally lie in bed at night, try chatting to Him, and then I’d roll over towards the wall by my bed and think “there is no chance He wants me to talk to Him.”  imHHBut David, the guy that God himself dubbed as being after His heart knew that there that self a cleansing period was pointless because that doesn’t work. God does want us to roll over, in His direction and to the cross.

As I drove and thought about the tyre guy it made me realise that I need to not revert to that old thinking method that puts distance between me and my Father. And as I drove away thinking about Psalm 51 my thoughts started flicking through the Bible to accounts of when Jesus embraced the very messy with grace. The woman at the well, the woman and her hair to name just two that kept going round my head. Hosea was being played in my head too!

The conversation with him did me the world of good. It pointed me back to a cool lesson that God has been teaching me for a while. If you are the praying type, pray for me in that.

I know where I will go for my back tyres when they are due to be changed. I hope and pray the conversation was good for him. And again, if you are one of these weird praying people, pray that he knows he can go to God just the way he looked in his tyre-ness. Messy. David would vouch for that too I think. And a guy who once walked on a road leading to Damascus.