...You never look at a picture of a beautiful living room and picture yourself in it sleep-deprived with a bad headache and needing to go to the bathroom. You do no envision that Cape Cod getaway as the place the whole family would get the stomach flu.
Oftentimes mothers want this for their real lives. We always want everything to look as if we have arrived, all the time. That is like focusing entirely on the victory moment. Like a football player who never trains, but only practices his touchdown dance. Like a woman who sets beautiful tables for a living, but never feeds anyone Real life is messy because it is going somewhere. Things constantly need to be done because people are constantly growing. Repetition should not be discouraging to us, it should be challenging.
When we buy into this kind of idealism, we start seeing things as failures that are anything but...We don't know the value of what we do. We can't always see why God wants us to be doing these things, so we want to negotiate with Him. Lord, couldn't you think of something better for me to do? Or worse, rather than complain to God, asking for Him to answer us, we complain to others. We fuss at the children for being what they can't help being. We get dreary to our husbands, explaining yet again how repetitive our lives are...We belittle our work, we make much of the mindlessness of it, and, not surprisingly, we then lose interest in it.
But imagine we could switch this attitude into a situation where we understand the value of the repetition. Imagine we could see a young girl at a piano, practicing scales with a world-class teacher. Imagine that instead of seeing that she was being taught the fundamentals of something amazing, she was mocking it. Imagine she was complaining and moaning and drooping. Imagine she wouldn't try them. Imagine she was hollering to anyone close enough about how unfulfilling and demeaning this work was, or just sighing to herself continuously. Imagine that she used as her main argument that she was above this kind of fiddly work because she was meant to be a concert pianist.
I hope that we would all see the foolishness of this kind of attitude. Feeling above it all is simply a way of showing that it is actually above you...
When we honor God in our work, we please Him. We aren't doing this to impress others. We don't need to try. We do not need to justify all the work we are doing to the world, because we are not the teacher. We are the student. We need to trust the teacher, and rest in knowing that our teacher does not make mistakes. He is giving us the perfect things to practice. He is making us into exactly what He wants us to be.
~ Rachel Jankovic, from the chapter entitled "Discipleship of the Mundane" in her new book Fit to Burst
Love it.
ReplyDelete