Cleaning Up Our Messes

This past Christmas Eve, I was heading to the Vintage Barber Lounge on West Addison to visit my guy Isaiah. As I neared Messiah Lutheran Church, I noticed an excited golden Labrador bounding toward the corner. It sniffed the large wooden Nativity scene, then proceeded to pee all over Jesus in his manger. This was not just a quick tinkle, but a full-blown drowning of the Christ child.

As I passed by the dripping Jesus, my first reaction was complete disgust. How could the owner let his Lab wander without a leash and take a robust leak all over the “reason for the season”? The dog certainly didn’t know any better, but the owner’s lack of mindfulness stuck with me. I wanted to scream, “Clean that mess up!” but I kept quiet.

My brother loves to tell the story of me sleepwalking in middle school. On one fateful evening, I silently lumbered past my mother and father as they watched television in the living room. In the kitchen, I opened the cabinet below the sink and peed all over the trash can. After closing the door, I returned to bed with no knowledge of what had transpired.

My parents never talked about this until years later. Maybe they thought I’d be too embarrassed to learn about my kitchen urinal experience. They certainly cleaned up my mess afterward. But that’s what parents do – whether it’s changing thousands of diapers or intervening in difficult adolescent situations. There were many times my mother simply rolled her eyes and closed the door to my trashed bedroom when we had guests over.

As young adults, we become our own life janitors. Over the years, I created a number of personal messes with no one there to clean them up but myself. There were financial messes from credit card faux pas. Educational messes across multiple colleges. And a few stretches of not having my shit together at all. Back then, I’m sure people said I was a mess.

For those who persevere, though, we eventually clean up our act and graduate to cleaning up other people’s messes. Some vocations do exactly that. Think garbage collectors, divorce attorneys, psychologists, and, of course, the IT help desk.

On New Year’s Eve, we flew back from Florida so my son could ring in 2026 with his friends. Along the way, we stopped at a dolphin rescue center and nearby Key Largo Fisheries for lunch. The restaurant backs up to a dock with quintessential views of charter boats, hungry pelicans, and regulars sporting leather-faced tans. It reminded me of a spot in Marathon where my uncle Jim docked his boat decades earlier.

While waiting for my cobia tacos, I wandered over to the edge of the dock to catch a glimpse of what was swimming below. One eager eight-year-old excitedly screamed, “Mom, there’s a shark down there!” Half checked-out, she replied, “That’s not a shark Justin, that’s just a fish.” Well it was a shark – probably a six- to eight-foot nurse shark – swimming in the shade, slowly cleaning up countless fish parts and crustaceans on the sandy floor.

The world is messy – pick a lane: politics, the environment, human rights, AI. Our imperfections and differences are what keep things interesting, even when they leave behind messes no one volunteered to clean. Sometimes we’re the ones making them. Sometimes we’re the embarrassed parents reaching for paper towels. And sometimes we’re just sleepwalking through life, convinced it’s “not a shark, just a fish,” while chaos swims quietly below the surface.