Mess

It is 4:00 in the morning right now. I have to get up in less than two hours but I can't sleep. I keep thinking about the idea of living within beauty and grace and wondering how the reality of that has escaped me.
Somehow, my life has flown out of my control again. It has a tendency to that to me. I begin with it all shiny and pretty, holding it in my hands, amazed at its compactability, at the way in which it loops together like a piece of fiction, full of symbolism and meaning and characters that foreshadow truth. I see it from the outside and I have faith in its meaning and purpose and direction. I have faith in my abilities to be beautiful and gracious.
And then things start to unravel.
I start pulling at a loose string of a messy house, an unmade phone call, a forgotten errand. Seemingly insignificant details that reflect a life about to go askew.

"Ah, but the devil is in the details Ang."

I begin to panic. But only a little. So I tidy up my details and continue on momentarily.

Things speed up and instead of watching my life as it happens I am watching it like an observer of a recorded history. I haven't the luxury of time to ensure I am living in the moment. The moment has come and gone two days ago and somehow I get to another point without even realizing there was a moment.
The devil becomes more complex. Details of daily brokenness push in:
broken expectations,
broken health,
broken relationships,
broken lives.
And I can't seem to stop the internal monologue that keeps telling me something is terribly wrong. This is not my life. When do I get to be beautiful? When do I get to be gracious?

The reality and the ideal are at such odds with each other they wear me out with their eternal bickering. So much so that at 4:00 in the morning I can't sleep because of their yelling. My compact, directed life is a messy heap of dead end knots.
So I get out of bed and decide to write myself into some peace, or at least exhaustion. The binary simplicity of black symbols on a white screen is comforting in its logic but I haven't reached a compelling conclusion. I haven't found my beauty in the everyday- in the 4:00 in the morning day, except that as I write I remember that this is it. That the uncomfortable knots are ugly but unavoidable, and perhaps the kindest thing to do, the most beautiful thing to do, would be to offer myself some grace and find some sleep.