I find Rubik’s cubes relaxing. I suppose the opposite is true for some people, considering how they can frustrate the dickens out of you, but I see them differently. A scrambled Rubik’s cube is a chaotic mess. It’s literally a puzzle to solve; a single-sitting challenge where one mistake takes you back to square one. But oh, to solve the puzzle…there is joy, or at least satisfaction, for a little while.
Bringing order from chaos is one of the few things I’m really good at. A house populated by seven children and four cats has plenty of chaos, and plenty of ways to deal with it.
Parents with even one child understand the chaos that ensues from a toddler let loose in a toy bin. All parents eventually acquire a toy bin, or a basket, or a box full of miscellaneous items that never get reorganized.
Why? Because it’s easier, and there are too many challenges presented every day to worry about getting the alphabet fridge magnets, floor puzzle pieces, or action figure weapons in the right place. Just toss all that junk into the basket, and hurry, because (so and so) will be here any minute, and this house isn’t supposed to look like a pigsty.
Cleaning up is one thing; order is different. Order means aligning things so they make sense, so you have what you need at the proper time without having to think about it. Perhaps it sounds more impressive to use the term “logistics.” I love logistics.
When I’m getting ready to travel I make a list of things I’ll need, from socks to ibuprofen, car phone chargers to good pens and everything in between. Every contingency planned for, consolidated and prioritized to fit the space allocation.
But it’s not enough to just have the things with you. The true skill lies in strategic packing. Access to what you need, when you’ll need it, without taking up precious space beforehand – that is a puzzle to solve.
What good will the ibuprofen checked in your luggage do when your back is on fire mid-Atlantic? That, my friend, is when Vince unzips the tiny little pocket on the bottom of his backpack and pulls out the flat mini-case of pills (which also has a few Flomax, because I once had a kidney stone and ain’t never getting caught off guard that way again), right next to his backup pair of headphones, and his wife’s iPhone adapter (because I’m her logistics guy). Nice try Apple, I’ve got your number. Logistics!
I have some dear friends who recently spent three months rafting Alaska’s Yukon river.
One family of eight, on two rafts, in bush Alaska for eighty days. The logistics were daunting, but they rocked it and had what they needed. I would have loved that part of it. (Going to the bathroom in a bucket? Not so much.)
I’ve been creating a lot of order from chaos lately. We started the planning stages for our new writing careers last January to launch in May. Every step of the way has presented a new challenge we didn’t expect.
Whenever I thought I had the logistics dialed in, a new twist of the Rubik’s cube of our life created more chaos to correct: pregnancy (twist), adding a new ministry responsibility (twist, turn), or launching an eighteen-year-old (flip, rotate, spin, headdesk).
It’s fine though, because long ago I learned the fine art of fitting square pegs into round holes. I live for this stuff – not the struggle, nor even the challenge, but the victory.
Once time my boss and I had our whole crew call in sick. We had to manage an entire department on a busy Saturday, just the two of us. It sucked but it was also awesome. When the door finally closed on the day, we looked at each other and smiled: Order from chaos.
I moved into our current home in the middle of winter. By April I saw a chaotic mess of discarded wood scraps emerge from the snow. I swooned. There were so many pieces of wood to make things out of: old pallets, weathered 2x6x15’s, treated 2×6 decking. Hallelujah, the Lord provides! I can make someting out of those old boards.
We can pick up the broken and disjointed pieces of a project gone awry and create something. I love chaos because of the potential it brings. When everything is a mess, you can organize it however you want. God brings new life into things that were once dead because I think He enjoys it in the same way. God looks at our lives the way I look at a scrambled Rubik’s Cube. Here, hand that over to me. I’m gonna fix that.
I don’t always have it figured out. Often I try to organize things and end up falling flat. I just scramble it up again and try another way, but I’ll get it in the end.
That is the moment of victory; when you turn the last piece and see the order you’ve created. Or you get to watch Him create something even grander that you never could.
As The A-Team’s Hannibal Smith would say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
