All My Clumsy Messy Glory.

At my university, there is either no parking at all or you have to park in a lot that is so small that playing bumper cars is almost inevitable.Today bumper cars won.I hit someone’s car in the parking lot—well, hit is a strong word. I nudged it enough to scrape a bit of paint off of their bumper. The damage was minimal. I could have buffed it out myself and they would have never known, but I still put a note on the dash like a good person and left not thinking much of it.I wasn’t worried about their car. I wasn’t worried about getting an angry call later or about what it may cost if they wanted me to pay for the scratch. Nothing about the actual incident fazed me. It happens. It’ll probably happen again. However, as I drove away, I felt a fear rising. One that I knew was irrational. One I knew was a liar, telling me things that I had heard a million times before. Yet there I was, trying to push back the fears as though they were brand new.You see, I was not alone for this. I was driving a friend back to their car on the other side of campus, so they had a front row seat to my humanity. The humanity that I still try hard to hide.I like to think I’ve done a lot of growing over the past few years in regards to being vulnerable, owning my humanity, and trying to put the act of “togetherness" aside. So it was interesting to me that in that moment how caught I felt, how exposed, how fearful I was that such a common moment of humanity would be too much for the person in my passenger seat to bear.I feel like I talk all the time about how we are all human, all messy, and all in need of a Savior—which is so very true. However, the second it is me, bumping into cars or cursing when I’m angry or making a bad decision, I feel the need to run off into the woods and hide among the trees. I think to myself, “The trees are rooted. They can’t leave. But people? They could walk away without so much of a goodbye. It has happened before. Hiding is better than getting left. And surely if these people see me, actually see me, they will leave”That’s the fear that spoke to me in the moments after playing bumper cars in the parking lot. The one that has frequently shown up all my life, telling me to flee the state instead of stand my ground, telling me to shrink in embarrassment instead of learn how to laugh at my God-given humanity, deny the cross rather than let Jesus and His grace embrace me.And the very real, hard truth is that some people do leave. There is no point trying to cover up that fact. They leave, but I’ve found that better ones, the right ones, come to fill their place. The very best people in my life, the ones who I love and am loved by, are the ones who witnessed my humanity breaking through and said, “Oh hey, I’ve done that too.” They are the ones that have caught me singing and dancing with my lack of rhythm and tone and joined in. They are the people who have sat with me in some of my greater mistakes and proved they weren’t going anywhere. The ones who showed up with reminders that unlike me, Jesus doesn’t scare easy. He doesn’t leave. That there is no need to run or hide from them or Him.I just love Jesus for the way that He can take something so simple and human, like bumping into a car, and reveal my own heart to me. It is almost like in our moments of humanity, even the seemingly most insignificant ones, He swoops in to teach us things that we are often to prideful to hear. I love that while I can look back and see how far I’ve come, I still have so much more to learn about being human and being seen.I think we have to stop fearing that people will leave the second be become an actual person. We have to drop our acts, learn to laugh, and invite people to simple be beautifully human with us.Because a lot of the relationships that I hold dear in my life have grown from allowing them to see me in all my clumsy, messy, glory. And from getting to see their humanity too.I’m not saying that we should all bump into cars in parking lots—but, hey, whatever it takes to learn.words by Jacqueline Winstead and photo by Sara Beth Pritchard