Clean Desks

I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs personality preference profile a few times. Some of the insights it reveals about my personality are no brainers. I’m an extrovert out the whazoo. And then there’s the way I keep order. I don’t. I have a tendency to not worry too much about how my desk looks at any time of day, week, month, or year. True, I’m infamous for loosing things. But then there’s always the epiphanous moment when I rediscover them.

I was at a continuing education event once where we were sorted by personality type. We’d all taken the test and sent them in before we got there. So I was in a group of six other extroverted, disorganized ministers. Fifteen minutes into the exercise we were laughing at our shared normality. One guy put a trash can at the end of his desk every six months and emptied whatever was piled on it into the gaping maw of oblivion. I asked him, “Did you ever miss anything?” His simple answer was “Not unless you count all the anxiety I dump with the trash on my desk.” In another fifteen minutes we were trying to figure out where to go for beer after the class and I noticed the other groups. One of them had found and easel and markers. They were making a list. Another group was sitting quietly. I bet they all had clean desks.

I used to worry about the creation story that most people are familiar with. There’s an awful lot of ordering and separating and judging going on there. I worried that God was the ultimate bean counter. This god liked things neat. And the chaos that was conquered by all the ordering and separating and judging was more similar to my fly by the seat of the pants reality. So did that make me on the outside of God’s orderliness?

You might scoff, but I’ve been told point blank and almost diplomatically over the years that my lack of order was paramount to a failure in my moral system and a good reason why my spiritual leadership was questionable. The budget types wield powerful influence over the hearts and minds and pocket books of the church. And they are faithful workers in the vineyard.

It was pretty easy for me to get the idea that God’s image that we were made in didn’t include a nose. Creativity and separating and seeing that stuff was good were more in line with a family resemblance each of us receives, noses and such. But there’s more to our resemblance to God than some such specificity. Sure God ordered things. But the order included pretty intricate things like snowflakes and down right messy stuff like birth. And just because something’s messy doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And when the One decides it time to step outside the nice neat order of things and make something happen, we don’t call that wrong, we call that a miracle.

So in this convoluted manner, using whatever kinky form of logic my messy brain would allow, I decided that even if the writer of Genesis would disapprove of my lack of a coherent filing system, the Holy Spirit allowed for all kinds of loop holes. Even for people with messy desks.

Whew, what a relief. Now where did I put that sermon I was working on?