Making the Bed: Order
Order
The birthdefects.org website lists six characteristics associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder:
Checking things repeatedly
Constant counting while performing routine tasks
Constant rearranging in a precise fashion
Pictures, words, nonsense words, images of a disturbing nature “pop” into the head and will not go away.
Hoarding of objects with no apparent value
Excessive fear of contamination
I find myself bristling at the fact that OCD is categorized as a “birth defect” and my brow furrowing as I realize that a third of these traits applied to me for many years. Now, I’ve never been actually diagnosed with OCD (I should also mention I’ve never been tested), but I have certainly been labeled that way throughout my life by a variety of people I have met, and I have often thought about myself somewhere on that spectrum. I remember these traits of constant counting (and getting up to certain numbers at certain places before starting over) and constantly rearranging things in a precise fashion being regular parts of my daily existence, particularly in the two years after my sister was killed.
Harrison comments, “In my small chaos, I made small order” (28). I think that’s precisely what I was trying to do in my rituals - I realized that having control over something (be it ever so small: my alphabetized CDs in their case or my stuffed animals living in the exact same position on my dorm room bed every single day) gave me the comforting allusion that I somehow had any sort of control in this chaotic world. My world had shattered into millions of pieces that beautiful summer day when that car hit my sister’s bike, ending her life, and everything felt like it was spiraling. My way to manage to breathe in and breathe out was reflected in my tiny ordered world of that 12’ x 19’ space.
Obviously, I didn’t really have any control; that was one of the scary realizations of living life as a blossoming adult. My life was a daily surrender to the admission that the only reason I existed that morning was because of God’s will. You would think that I would’ve begun to learn that truth, but sometimes when we’re 18 or 19 years old, lessons bounce right off us, and they have to try again once we’re older and more open to these central truths to being merely a human in this universe of ours.
Even now, I have this same feeling that Harrison explains, “And then there was a little space, an ordered rectangle in my messy home. And that rectangle somehow carved out a small ordered space in my messy, distracted mind” (28). When the busyness, pace, and demands of being a mother in a family of four children close in age overwhelms our house, I look for a place where I can make a dent and live in that little safe space of my rectangle of completed tasks. I vividly remember one day sitting on the floor folding laundry when my kids were between the ages of 2 and 8 and watching the chaos created in their four wakes of creativity while the orderly little snail, known as Mommy in those days, strove to attain some kind of order in her slime-(AKA sanity) leaving pathway across the room. It was four against one, though, and the evidence of my progress was soon covered over by the fun and the messes. It’s easier now in most ways, now that my kids are older, and I think my children know for the most part not to disrupt my ordered space. I do take comfort in I Corinthians 14:33b:“For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.”
But how often do we delude ourselves into thinking that we can find our own peace in our chaos? Take comfort in knowing that God is the one who brings us this sense of calm: “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you!” Isaiah 26:3 (NLT) Whether we struggle with a personality that longs intensely for perfection or whether we already do an incredible job keeping our household in working order or whether we fall somewhere in between, the only place that our souls can find rest is in God. Join with me in my sigh of relief that God provides for us an ordered rectangle next to his heart.
