I deal with interruptions and pop-up requests at work much more gracefully than I do at home. I haven’t yet internalized and automatized “doing everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). This despite the facilitation that my realizing that the Prime Desire is always fulfillable should bring. I must be missing a piece at home, something I have at work but don’t have at home. What is it?
At work, I’m glad when work piles up. At home, that stresses me out. At work, when someone approaches me about something they want done, I smile and sometimes even thank them for the cool thing to work on. (Naturally, this is not true when the thing they’re approaching me about is something I built that has broken.) But when someone approaches me about something they want done at home, I grumble and resent.
What are the contextual differences that might account for the differences in my response?
Sometimes my life—my whole life—feels like a driveway on a continually and very snowy day: As soon I’ve shoveled one side of it clear, enough fresh snow has fallen on the other side to prevent me from ever getting out.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). There’s a synergy between these three commands. It’s easier to rejoice when you’re praying continually and giving thanks in everything; it’s easier to pray continually when you’re rejoicing always and giving thanks in everything (after all, to whom are we to give thanks for things like existence?); it’s easier to give thanks in everything when you’re rejoicing always and praying continually.
But all these require that you be here now and do what you’re doing, thinking not of other things.
Just listened to: a recording of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas (1820–1822) by Penelope Crawford on Musica Omnia (2011) during a rainy walk through the neighborhood. A master of the fortepiano plays the final trilogy of a (by then deaf) master of piano composition. Together, they bless us with helpings of hymn-like lyricism, proto-jazz, and Debussy—the last two written eighty years ahead of schedule. (They also serve us some C Minor storminess. But with this guy, what else is new?)
“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living” (Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, emphasis mine). I want to carry this thought with me all the time as I age; it teaches me how to relate to others, all of whom will die someday, and how to relate to myself, who will also die someday.
Just listened to Kings Kaleidoscope (2023) by Kings Kaleidoscope. Therapeutically upbeat chamber beatbox pop that sits just on this side of my K-LOVE hate line (thanks to its offering some musical adventuresomeness alongside its therapeutics).
In my current experience of the English language, “Why?” is increasingly used exclusively as a prefix for lament, dispute, or displeasure rather than as the start of a question born of humble curiosity.
Just watched Get Out (2017), written and directed by Jordan Peele. Well-written, expertly cast, Hitchcockian contrivance as feature-length parable about being Black in a White world. Is it naïve to think it could be a revelation to some? Probably, but the movie did, I think, succeed in helping cultivate my own capacity for sympathy. An astounding directorial debut.
Just listened to: Yesterday’s Wine (1971) by Willie Nelson. More Christian moral instruction in a single, ten-line song than in whole catalogs of Christian devotional music. What a dirty, liberal, redneck hippie. And what an understated, if occasionally soporific, country mini-masterpiece the whole album.
It’s not regimen or self-discipline I’ll need if I want to write songs, silly. I have that. It’s company. In the sea of commitments I swim in, it’s commitments alone that cause efforts to float. It’s time to start a songwriting group.
The Bible says nothing about the importance of setting or achieving goals per se. If you set no goals, yet you love—that is, if you act as though God and those around you are important and their good matters to you—you’re doing alright. If you achieve no goals, yet you love, you’re doing alright.
That’s it! I think that for me, although I know in my head that this is what I should want, I actually really want other things. If I truly only wanted to love Him and others, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, to rejoice, pray, give thanks and make peace, then I would have opportunity to do what I want, every moment of every day. But I find in myself anger at setbacks, annoyance at disruptions, fear of failure to accomplish something, longing to be understood and liked, and desire to “feel good” through a panoply of means which I have discovered over years of living. So my prayer lately has been: “God, I am powerless even to want what I know I should want!”
me:
I hear you! “I am powerless even to want what I know I should want.” True.
Some disjointed follow-up thoughts:
For my part, l am so motivated by a desire to steer clear of feeling bad (angry, disgruntled, disappointed, frustrated, resentful, petulant, argumentative) that I’m thrilled to have found a...
“Critics of penal substitutionary atonement, and I find this a bit of a head-scratcher, routinely fail to appreciate how mercy, grace, pardon, and forgiveness are integral to the gospel” (Richard Beck). Amen to that!—and remember that I happen to think penal substitutionary atonement is bunkus.
I have many such desires. This world is overstuffed with opportunities to do and enjoy good. But it doesn’t often matter which I choose to fulfill, or even that I fulfill any of them at all. What’s important is that I fulfill the Prime Desire to do the will of God—even, I should emphasize, when that Desire...
Just re-listened to: Swordfishtrombones (1983) by Tom Waits. Barroom theatre under a heavy patina of sonic curios (horns, accordion, harmonium, Chromelodeon, bagpipes, bass-marimba, aunglong, squeeze drum, bell plate, brake drum, legs of a stool), creating a whole pocket universe of underbellies. If Heath Ledger didn’t take direct, wholesale inspiration from “Frank’s Wild Years” for his portrayal of The Joker, then I’ll be an organ grinder’s monkey.
Over the summer, my primary prayer for myself was that everything I do, say, and think be done, said, and thought in total love for You and love for those around me like they’re myself. A week or two ago, that prayer became more specific: that all my talking be full of grace (gift), as though seasoned with salt. And today, You’ve narrowed the focus even more: Let me do everything without grumbling or arguing. In the thick of this stressful period of home improvement that has often heavily dampened my mood and occasionally strained my relationship with Carla by its insistence that I keep working and my frequent ignoring of that insistence because of my antipathy for this kind of work—I couldn’t think of a more perfect directive. Thanks.
If one is going to spend one’s free time working, it should be work one enjoys or work that directly benefits others—ideally both. Do-it-yourself home improvement is neither of those (for me).