Why doing less grates

If you'll remember, I was initially dismissive of my husband's call to do less. But I think I realized why I felt the idea stank when I first heard it.

First of all, I have typically been rewarded for doing more. It brings me glory and recognition. As I mentioned previously, in high school, I "did more" and I won big time. I was an academic rock star, and I was lonely and miserable and I had heard that Jesus offered living water but there was none for me. At college, I said, "Screw doing more. Where's the living water?" God, in his grace, brought a group of people around me that loved me despite being a basket case, apart from the lauds and laurels the university had for me.

However, in terms of kingdom living, I've been taught since I was a child that there is kingdom work to do:

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
~Jesus' words to his disciples, the good news according to Matthew, chpt 9

I've always understood this to mean, "Hey, stop lazing around and DO stuff! Can't you see there's more work than we could ever possibly finish? Hop to it!" But this week, a passage that the Sunday sermon focused on talked about what God does and where real glory belongs:

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
~Paul's letter to believers in Ephesus, chpt 3

But that's kind of the point, there is more work than I could ever do, but God is able to do immeasurably more than I could even ask or imagine and it brings him glory to do it.

The idea of doing less grates for me because it takes the focus off of what I can accomplish and requires me to trust that God is going to pull through. Doing less requires me to ask God, "Well, what do you want me to do?" and to listen and obey even if I don't know how that's going to get me/the kingdom/my family/my career all the way from point A to point B. To me, doing less feels like doing half way. More is better. If I'm not exhausted and miserable, I must not be doing enough. But again, that's the point, I can never "do enough"; God is the primary doer and he does more than enough. Doing less acknowledges this.

Do diligently: Lessons from my husband

As butter noted in the previous post the quiet life is not an inactive life. I completely agree, and if you hung around our house, you'd experience a certain hum. For our family "do less" is about the pitch of the hum. It's about being deliberate instead of getting swept into a panicked frenzy or taut exhaustion.

I write about "doing less" because I'm a recovering "do more" person. As in, I've spent the past 14 years since graduating from high school trying to figure out what is doing for doing sake and what is actually worth doing. In high school, I figured that doing more stuff added lines to the resume which made getting into college more likely. So I did that, and I was rewarded handsomely--I got a scholarship to a top-10 university. I was also totally miserable.

One thing I really admire about my husband N is that he is extremely diligent in what he does. A fair amount of this may be his personality and he may be focused to a fault at times, but since that trait is not my strong suit I'm totally wow-ed.

By profession and interest, N is a programmer. This is not like saying so-and-so is a lawyer or such-and-such is a fireman. N has been programming since he was 8. Other than eating and tying my shoes, I don't know what I've been doing since I was 8. And I know no one starts lawyering or fighting fires at 8. When it comes to programming, his basic MO is "make it work." When he can't make it work, he gets really frustrated. Now this might sound very normal, but think about all the worker bees around the world who are just punching the clock. They go to work and all they want to do is to survive to the end of the day doing enough to not get fired.

While promotions and raises are nice, really what N wants is for the thing to work right. This desire is so strong that his personal hobby time is devoted to fixing a video game that is 10 years old that a couple hundred people in the world might still play. He doesn't get paid for this, and in fact, one of the current players cussed him out in a Hitler parody video.

Well, if you're anything like me, N's diligence and focus sound impossible. I'm a real scatter brain. My cousin calls me a "dropper"; N loves this, and I have to admit it is kind of true. I leave things around; I half finish tasks. It's not pretty. "Do less" gives me a fighting chance of working toward diligence. There are two parts to this. On the one hand, when I'm stressed or feeling my plate is over-full, the dropping goes up exponentially and I feel justified about it. On the other hand, when we're at a good hum with a full, but not over-full plate, I'm able to reign in the scatter-brained-ness and see things through.

This year in "doing less" has certainly not been about doing nothing. It's been about saying yes to some things and no to other things so that the things we say yes to actually get accomplished and not left half done. Although, since I'm part of this deal--let's be honest--some things are still dropped half way through.

The good news of faithfulness

We spent the weekend with our local church family hashing out God's call to magnify his glory by introducing people to life in his kingdom. We are 100% on board with the church vision that people in our city have repeated opportunities to experience the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ. We really struggle with understanding how our family is to participate in this.

In our year of "do less", we're hearing from the pulpit "do more". As we grow older and are more comfortable with how God made us, the "success" stories presented to us don't look like our lives. Whether it's true or not, what we seem to be hearing is that who we are isn't valuable. We need to be X. X meaning more extroverted, more exhausted, more what we weren't made to be.

As I step back and look at who N and I are, we're the un-glamour family. Professionally, we're actually reasonably accomplished; N has worked on some high profile video game titles, I've published a couple books. But when I think about our lives in among our neighbors and friends, there's not a lot of flash and bang. We're not going to win community service awards for hours at the soup kitchen. But our neighbors will drop by to borrow an egg or ask for computer advice. People from 5, 10, 15 years ago will call when they need a friend. In a dozen months, we've had about that many out of town visitors.

Doing less goes hand in hand with marginal living and allows us to steward what we have. Because we're not out running around every weekend, N has time to learn how to keep up our yard. This is important first, because it is simply part of being a good neighbor and second, because it helps us connect with our neighbors who happen to care about their yards and are way more knowledgeable than we are. Because there are "margins" in my life, white spaces, when crises arise as they seem to with some regularity, instead of being bowled over I can pray and contribute.

Our pastor reminded us this weekend that becoming a child of God cost us nothing (because Jesus paid it all), but that becoming a disciple costs us everything. I don't disagree. Following Jesus is about recognizing that we are dead, dying to ourselves, so that Christ lives in us. But these words coming from a go-go-go church planter easily sound like we have to burn ourselves out to become disciples. I know the Apostle Paul uses a lot of race and training imagery, but he also exhorts the believers in Thessolonica to make it their ambition to lead a quiet life...so that their daily lives would win the respect of outsiders.

Maybe if I could summarize our struggle it's that we are Appalachian trail through hikers who feel exhorted to sprint marathons. What we have to offer is the faithfulness of putting one foot ahead of the other, mile after mile. No flash, no oos and ahhs. I think this is a deep grace in our lives, and I think there is an element of gospel-living in this that I'm unwilling to give up in order to squeeze ourselves into a check box that makes sense to who knows who? I live with the deep trust that as we are drawn deeper into God's grace, our lives will be more and more aligned with God's view of and work in this world. How could it not be?

89 cent chicken and stewarding what we have

In the last post, I wrote about ways that I've been preparing whole chickens I get for 89 cents a pound. And then I thought to myself, "Why's it so important to me that the chicken is 89 cents a pound?" As it turns out, this is actually related to the year of "doing less". Doing less doesn't mean we're doing nothing. What I'm finding is that we're being drawn back over and over again to "stewarding what we have".

It's tax time here at our place and this ends up being our annual tally up how much we gave away assessment. We try to give away 15% of our gross income every year, but stuff comes up and we may give away more.

89 cent chicken instead of $3.99 chicken helps us to support:
Our local church that invests in us and our community
Friends who invested in us and are now missionaries in Thailand
A child in South America through Compassion Intl.
Friends who have been working to get kids off the streets in Tanzania
Friends who invested in me when I was a college student. One couple is now investing in post-college people and new teachers across the US and another is investing in college kids in Hungary.
Friends who work with the urban poor off my college campus.

I like doing this annual tally because I'm reminded why we didn't buy a fancier house, cooler, new gadgets, and hip furniture and why we do drive older cars and look for ways to spend less. Would it be nice to have our lives "tricked out"? Probably, for a while. But what means more to us is having relationships that are meaningful. We're not the most relationally savvy folk around, so we're grateful to the folk that have poured into us. And I think that's a good thing and something the Apostle Paul encouraged. We want to help them out as we can and right now that's financially. We have money and when we steward our money well, we get to participate in extending the kingdom of God far beyond what we could do with our own two hands and two feet.

Those are the thoughts for the day, more on doing less and stewarding what we have later.

I am one of the dead

The past couple months have been a rough time. Not only have I felt stretched physically, particularly as I've been smacked with 3rd trimester fatigue, but emotionally, I've felt barely able to hang on. In this frame of mind, I encountered the Apostle Paul talking about his rough time in his second letter to believers in Corinth:

...this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers.
~Chpt 1

As I've been meditating on these verses, I feel my faith is being pivotally changed under the gentlest care of a loving God.

During this rough time, it has become crucially apparent that I am powerless to solve the problems in and around my life. I am one of the dead. The natural processes in me are corruption and decay. Even if I wanted to I could not grit my teeth and make stuff happen; be holier, love better, trust God more. But in Christ, I experience life. I am one of the dead who is being raised to life by God. My part is to submit to that reality--I think that's what hope is--and there I find that I am indeed delivered, I am being delivered, and look forward to continued deliverance.

I think this experience is another reason why 2011 needs to more about "doing less". The cultural influences around me--my profession, the productivity/finance blogs I read, my church community--place a high value on getting things measurably done. I think there's an appropriate place for action and tangible accomplishment, but in this season, I think a mindset of "doing less" will allow me to better see and experience how "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." If you're a praying person, I would appreciate your prayers during this time.

Do less

We started the new year with N, my husband, fuming about how December went and complaining that we needed to do less. Or that's how I read it. December really wasn't all that bad. My brother visited for 2 days; we had N's company party to attend, and a cousin of mine came for a week from Christmas eve to New Year's eve. Socially, December wasn't much of anything. Granted the first two weeks I spent running my feet off taking care of our toddler and my post-operative mother-in-law. And then there was the impromptu pizza party at a neighbor's house on a Friday evening. We kind of let Christmas sneak up on us gift-wise, so there was a lot of last-minute head scratching, Amazon buying, and post-officing. And there was that baking stuff for the neighbors. So maybe December was a bit fuller than I thought. And to drive the message home January started off with a bang and not of the good variety. So at this point, I'm a believer. I am on N's side; 2011's theme so far is "Do less."

So far we've said no to all the birthday parties we've been invited to. I've promised N that I will tell anyone who wants to fly in to visit us to postpone their trip. We have a number of visitors already in the books. L's godmother in February, my family in May, my in-laws in the winter. Our second child arrives, as a hopefully permanent family fixture, in April. So we've got a number of good reasons to give people for visiting another time.

Our church is having a women's retreat in early Feb and a larger, longer family retreat in early April--yes, right before the baby is due. We're planning on prioritizing those which means we'll probably try to keep the remaining weekends pretty clear of "events".

Three weeks into this new year of "doing less", I'm observing first, that our ordinary life actually takes a fair amount of work and has a lot of moving parts. There's simply quite a bit to do even without "adding stuff". I put that in quotes because I realize for some people with different personalities than ours the "added stuff" is ordinary life. Spontaneous is good!! We're routine type people and events really knock us back. The second observation I have is that I'm still seeing God insert key relationships in our lives.

We keep a white board as an attempt to organize our life. On it I put a drawing of our block and the names of the people we've met and are praying for. There's been a family katy-corner from us that I sort of met months ago but haven't been able to get to know. Just this week, I've gotten to chat with the mom twice. Her sons are 3 and 5. We've been able to connect over having kids and talked about what having 2 kids is like. She has a research background and works at the university, so we've connected there. These times have been just what I've wanted and have been beautifully woven into our ordinary life. They haven't felt like an event or a doing, just crossing the street to let our kids play together or crossing the street to chat neighbors with neighbors. If "doing less" means more of that, count me in.