Life Lessons from Motherhood: untangling a slinky

In the typical, weird me fashion, I learned a profound lesson by watching and helping my children play this week. 

I have a love-hate relationship with slinkies.  They're fun to play with, and they do some terrific scientific demonstrations of waves.  Slinkies on stairs are pretty awesome, and they feel pretty cool in your hands and are somewhat mesmerizing.  This euphoric awesomeness can quickly be destroyed by shaking a slinky like a dog and tangling it up into a nearly unsolvable 3-D puzzle...which inevitably happens when my younger children play with one.  My 5 year old has a  particularly cute way of bringing me a mess of a slinky and saying "I'm sorry, Mom." The last time he did this, I murmured to myself as I started unwinding and figuring out the complex puzzle that he had created with his random, crazy, shaking way of playing with the slinky.  I knew the slinky meant a lot to him, but I still debated about throwing it away, because of the amount of time it would take to fix it.  I was frustrated with having to untangle it (again), and I said a quick prayer that I'd be able to somehow make use of the time I was spending on the slinky for other good things.  BAM! Inspiration hit.

I thought about how we are all like slinkies.  Each of us has a purpose, a plan.  We come in different shapes, sizes, colors and capacities, but we can all do some pretty nifty stuff...but not if we're randomly going every which way, running here and there and being completely scattered by this and that whim.  We have to pursue goals, we NEED to make plans and attempt to follow through with them.  Not that we have to have everything under perfect control, or completely organized all the time...sometimes we're going to drop the ball (or slinky) and it's still going to be fine.  Maybe a little tangle, but nothing we can't handle.  But life...it scrambles us.  We get distracted by this and that thing, and we start chasing different dreams, and getting confused about what we want, and where to find it, and pretty soon....we're a tangled mess.  And like my sweet little boy handed me the slinky and said "I'm sorry, Mom." and asked me to fix it, God can untangle our messes.  He knows what he's doing.  He's never tempted to throw us away, because we are of infinite worth to Him.  He will ALWAYS help us with the messes we create, even when we create them day after day after day.     I've approached Him many times with a tangled mess and an "I'm sorry" and He has worked healing miracles in my life.