In my job, quality counts.
In a very real sense, my job is to be mature. Without a deep well of personal
maturity to draw on, my hypocrisy becomes really evident really fast. So I set aside an hour or so each day
to check in with God, to read the bible, to process what I’m thinking and
feeling in this blog or in my tattered black journal. But it’s becoming clear
in light of my recent silent retreat and conversations with friends that what
I’m actually called to requires a much more radical whole-life orientation
change than an hour of sacred time each day.
It’s as radical as the
shift from being a “Sunday Christian” to allowing Jesus to call the shots in
your life and holding nothing back.
Growing in my faith (my
relationship with a loving heavenly Father) can’t just be a priority. It has to
be the entirety of my job. And why not? All through the bible, God calls us
plants, trees, sheep, baby chicks, and a bunch of other things that don’t have
a lot of agency or control! You’d think we’d understand by now that the thrust
of the Christian life is actively passive: letting God love me and letting that
love spill out onto others. Loving God means letting go, loosening my grasp,
opening my arms.
Psalm 1 talks about the
person who meditates day and night on God’s law (or in my context, more like
God himself and all the ways He’s revealed himself). It says that this
meditative person, whose whole disposition revolves around God is blessed in
all he does. And moreover, that he is like a tree planted by a river, roots
soaking in the life-giving water of God.
I think I’d like being a
tree. I think I’d like it if my primary vocation was to grow deep roots into a
big river of that truelifewater that Jesus offered the Samaritan woman, and
that in fact is Jesus himself.
But what about work? What
about (for me) compiling email databases, planning church services, writing
thank-yous, raising support, running errands, scheduling meetings, folding my
laundry. Those things need to get done and I hope I can slow down enough to do
each one with intentionality and gratitude to the God who gave me these duties.
But these days, I see them less as my vocation and more like my chores. My
vocation is God.
And the vision I want for
my life is this:
A tree planted by the
river, a “planting of the Lord for the display of His splendor” growing deep
roots into the love of Father God day and night. Inviting other thirsty saplings
to come drink with me, to graft themselves into my trunk, to be loved by me as
I am loved by the Father and to point them to their true Father, to encourage
them to grow deep roots of their own. It’s a life that’s less about doing and
producing… and more about being and welcoming. It’s a vision of hospitality, of
creating super-rich soil where folks can plop their hearts down for a while and
be nourished.
For almost a year God has
been asking me about my commitment to significance. “Would it be enough,” he’s
been saying, “just to be a righteous person? Do you need to be important, to
spearhead movements, to build big ministries?” Then yesterday as we talked, I
was asking if there was any way I can lessen the pain of the season of humbling
I sense is on the horizon. This is what he said:
“Adjust to the expectation
that you are not going to build a big or important ministry. Let that be okay.
Store up your treasures in heaven. Don’t you see? All my greatest saints ended
their lives in obscurity. It’s not what people said about them after they died
but what I said about them while they lived that mattered.”
Ufda.
So it’s interesting. I’m a
fairly hardworking person from an even more
hardworking family. All my life I’ve lived under the fear of the accusation of
laziness. The voice inside (not the
Father. The other one.) is always
saying, “work harder, move faster, produce more, be significant, don’t let anyone
catch you being lazy.” But now I’ve actually come to point where I’ve said,
“this is insane! I need to work less, not more!” That statement might push your
buttons. It sure pushes mine!
But my belief about work
is changing. I’m beginning to believe that hard work is good for the soul and
should be undertaken with long-strides, intentionality, and constant
thankfulness so that even in working, we might nourish our roots with the
God-water. But it should be driven primarily by the goodness of labor, not by the
desperation of productivity or the threat of the missing paycheck. Because
ultimately, our activity dies with our bodies and comes to nothing (Ecclesiastes
anyone?). Only the fruit it cultivates in our souls remains in eternity.
Will I really come to my
deathbed and wish I’d had a busier life? I think not. Especially if that
frantic business compromises the depth of my roots and my ability to grow
(which it commonly does) and display the splendor of God to my family and my
community. So let my life’s great labor be to love and be loved, to grow deep
roots, to be a parent, husband, and child, to simply “abide” in the Jesus. Is
any of this making sense? I feel like it’s all swirling around in my head but I
don’t really know make it happen in a healthy way. To be instead of do, to
relate instead of achieve… it’s all so foreign to my experience, my culture.
Like I said, it’s a whole-life change of orientation…
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