Able to pray with those who pray.
I write this at a time when the church talks much about being purpose-driven. This is a good thing, but we ought to practice a bit of holy cynicism about it. We should be a little uneasy about the pairing of purposefulness with drivenness. Something’s out of kilter there. Drivenness may awaken or be a catalyst for purpose, but it rarely fulfills it, more often it jettisons it. A common characteristic of driven people is that, at some point, they forget the purpose. They lose the point. The very reason they began something— embarked on a journey, undertook a project, waged a war, entered a profession, married a girl—erodes under the weight of their striving. Their original inspiration may be noble. But driven too hard, it gets supplanted by greed for more, or dread of setback, or force of habit.
Drivenness erodes purposefulness.
The difference between living on purpose and being driven surfaces most clearly in what we do with time. The driven are fanatical time managers—time mongers, time herders, time hoarders. Living on purpose requires skillful time management, true, but not the kind that turns brittle, that attempts to quarantine most of what makes life itself—the mess, the surprise, the breakdowns, the breakthroughs. Too much rigidity stifles purpose. I find that the more I try to manage time, the more anxious I get about it.
And the more prone I am to lose my purpose.
The truly purposeful have an ironic secret: they manage time less and pay attention more. The most purposeful people I know rarely overmanage time, and when they do it’s usually because they’re lapsing into drivenness, into a loss of purpose for which they overcompensate with mere busyness. No, the distinguishing mark of the purposeful is not time management.
It’s that they notice. They’re fully awake.
Jesus, for example. He lived life with the clearest and highest purpose. Yet he veered and strayed from one interruption to the next, with no apparent plan in hand other than his single, overarching one: get to Jerusalem and die. Otherwise, his days, as far as we can figure, were a series of zigzags and detours, apparent whims and second thoughts, interruptions and delays, off-the-cuff plans, spur-of-the-moment decisions, leisurely meals, serendipitous rounds of storytelling.
Who touched me?
You give them something to eat.
Let’s go to the other side.
Jesus was available—or not—according to some oblique logic all his own. He had an inner ear for the Father’s whispers, a third eye for the Spirit’s motions. One minute he’s not going to the temple, the next he is. One minute he refuses to help a wedding host solve his wine drought, the next he’s all over it. He’s ready to drop everything and rush over to a complete stranger’s house to heal his servant but dawdles four days while Lazarus—“the one he loves”—writhes in his death throes (see John 11:3); or fails to come at all when John—“the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”—languishes on death row (see Matt. 11:1–11). The closest we get to what dictated Jesus’s schedule is his own statement in John’s Gospel: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).
The apostle Peter, after declaring that Jesus is “Lord of all,” describes the supreme Sovereign’s modus operandi: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and . . . he went around doing good” (Acts 10:36, 38, emphasis mine). So that’s it, the sum of Christ’s earthly vocation: he wandered and he blessed. He was a physician vagabond. He was the original doctor without borders. His purpose was crystallized, but his method almost scattershot. “My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted,” Henri Nouwen said near the end of his life, “until I discovered the interruptions were my work.”1
No, Jesus didn’t seem to keep time. But he noticed. So many people along the way—blind men, lame men, wild men, fishermen, tax men, weeping whores, pleading fathers, grieving mothers, dying children, singing children, anyone—captured his attention. He stopped to tell a lot of stories, many of which arose out of, well, more interruptions: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me” (Luke 12:13); “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25); “Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Matt. 15:22). What’s more, he invited others to go and do likewise. Those driven to get and spend, to judge and exclude, he called to attention.
Look at the birds!
Look at those flowers!
Do you see this woman?
Where are the other nine?
Why do you call me good?
Who do you say I am?
Life does not consist of the abundance of our possessions, Jesus warned. And then he told a story about a rich fool who noticed all the trivial things and was oblivious to all the important ones. What matters, Jesus concluded, isn’t being rich in stuff, it’s being rich toward God. He explained the essence of such richness elsewhere: it’s having eyes to see, ears to hear.
It’s to notice, to pay attention to the time of God’s visitation.
“The dream of my life,” Mary Oliver writes,
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees—
To learn something of being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.2
Jesus was that “rich lens of attention.”
To live on purpose means to go and do likewise. Purposefulness requires paying attention, and paying attention means—almost by definition—that we make room for surprise. We become hospitable to interruption. I doubt we can notice for long without this hospitality. And to sustain it we need theological touchstones for it—a conviction in our bones that God is Lord of our days and years, and that his purposes and his presence often come disguised as detours, messes, defeats.
I came to you naked, Jesus says. I came to you thirsty.
“When, Lord?” we ask, startled.
When he wore the disguise of an interruption.
Think a moment of all the events and encounters that have shaped you most deeply and lastingly. How many did you see coming? How many did you engineer, manufacture, chase down?
And how many were interruptions?
Children? You might have planned as meticulously as a NASA rocket launch, but did you have any idea, really, what it would be like, who this child in your arms really was, who you would become because of him or her? The span between life as we intend it and life as we receive it is vast. Our true purpose is worked out in that gap. It is fashioned in the crucible of interruptions.
Mr. Holland’s Opus is the story of a man with a magnificent ambition. He wants to be a great composer. But he still has to pay the bills, so he and his young wife move to a small town where he teaches high school music, strictly for the money. All the while, he works on his masterpiece, his opus, laying the ground for his real calling. The plan is to teach for a few years, then step into his destiny.
But life keeps intruding. One year folds into two, into five, into fifteen. And then one day, Mr. Holland is old, and the school board shuffles him out for early retirement. He packs his desk. His wife and grown son come to fetch him. Walking down the school’s wide, empty hallways, he hears a sound in the auditorium. He goes to see what it is.
It’s a surprise.
Hundreds of his students from his years of teaching—many now old themselves—dozens of his colleagues, both current and former, hundreds of friends, fans, well-wishers, the room is packed. All have gathered to say thank you. An orchestra is there, made up of Mr. Holland’s students through the years. They’ve been preparing to perform Mr. Holland’s opus—the composition that, over four decades, he hammered out and tinkered with, polished, discarded, recovered, reworked, never finished.
They play it now.
But, of course, he knows, everyone knows: his opus isn’t the composition. His real opus, his true life’s masterpiece, stands before him, here, now. It’s not the musi
c. It is all these lives—men and women, young and old—his life has touched. It is all these people his passions and convictions have helped and shaped. It’s all that’s being formed in the crucible of interruptions.
This is his work. This is his purpose.
Finally, after all these years, he’s learned to number his days.
In 1973, the comedian Johnny Carson nearly caused a national crisis with a single wisecrack. That was the year North America’s long flight of postwar prosperity fell to earth like a shot goose in one ungainly plummet. There was runaway inflation. There were oil and food shortages. All the abundance that Americans had come to see as their due, their birthright, suddenly seemed in jeopardy.
And so on December 19, 1973, at 11:35 p.m., when Johnny Carson walked on the live studio set of The Tonight Show and quipped, “There’s an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States,” it wasn’t funny. The joke had a toehold in reality: earlier in the day, Congressman Harold Froehlich from Wisconsin had warned that if the federal bureaucracy didn’t get its act together soon and catch up on its supply bids, government agencies would run out of toilet tissue within a month or two. Carson took this shard of trivia and played it for a laugh. Then, as was his trademark, he swung at an invisible golf ball, took a commercial break, and got on with the show.
Not so the nation. Twenty million viewers flew into panic. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of frantic shoppers lined up outside the supermarkets of America, poised to dash to the paper aisles and stockpile rolls, fighting over bundles of two-ply and four-ply. There were brawls in aisleways and scrums at the checkout. Some store managers tried to limit sales—four rolls per customer—but they had no way of monitoring how many times a customer came back, and most came back repeatedly. By noon on December 20— mere hours after Johnny’s flippant remark—America was sold out. “I never saw anything like it,” one dazed grocer in New Jersey said.3
Johnny Carson’s one offhand gag line had sparked a national run on toilet tissue.
We’re generally gullible about news of scarcity. We have, it seems, an inbuilt skittishness about shortfall. This has been with us a long while, since the garden, by my reckoning.
Most of us live afraid that we’re almost out of time. But you and I, we’re heirs of eternity. We’re not short of days.
We just need to number them aright.
SABBATH LITURGY:
Redeeming the Time
“The world of the generous,” Eugene Peterson translates Proverbs 11:24, “gets larger and larger; / the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller” (MSG). This is more than a principle of financial stewardship, it’s a basic truth of life. Generous people generate things. And, consequently, their worlds are more varied, surprising, colorful, fruitful. They’re richer. More abounds with them, and yet they have a greater thirst and deeper capacity to take it all in. The world delights the generous but seldom overwhelms them.
Not so the stingy. Stinginess is parasitic, it chews life up and spits out bones. The stingy end up losing what they try so desperately to hold. As Jesus warned, those who store up treasure only on earth discover, too late, that such storage is merely composting. Or, as he warned in the parable of the talents, trying to preserve a thing intact never accomplishes even that much. Hoarding is only wasting. Keeping turns into losing. And so the world of the stingy shrinks. Skinflints, locked into a mind-set of scarcity, find that the world dwindles down to meet their withered expectations. Because they are convinced there isn’t enough, there never is.
This all relates to Sabbath-keeping. Generous people have more time. That’s the irony: those who sanctify time and who give time away—who treat time as gift and not possession—have time in abundance. Contrariwise, those who guard every minute, resent every interruption, ration every moment, never have enough. They’re always late, always behind, always scrambling, always driven. There is, of course, a place for wise management of our days and weeks and years. But management can quickly turn into rigidity. We hold time so tight we crush it, like a flower closed in the fist. We thought we were protecting it, but all we did was destroy it.
The taproot of generosity is spiritual. The apostle Paul, when he explains to the Corinthians about the astounding generosity of the Macedonians, remarks, “They gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us” (2 Cor. 8:5, emphasis mine). True generosity always moves in that sequence: first God, then others. First the Spirit, then the flesh.
And it always starts with giving, not something, but ourselves.
Give yourself first to God. Stop now, and give yourself—your breath, your health or sickness, your thoughts, your intents, all of who you are—to him. And your time, that too. Acknowledge that every moment you receive is God’s sheer gift. Resolve never to turn it into possession. What you receive as gift you must be willing to impart as gift. Invite God to direct your paths, to lead you in the way everlasting; be open to holy interruption, divine appointment, Spirit ambush (and ask God for the wisdom to know the difference). “Many are the plans in a man’s heart,” Proverbs says, “but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails” (19:21). Surrender to his purpose with gladness. Vow not to resist or resent it.
Give yourself first to God.
Now the hard thing: give yourself to others. Enter this day with a deep resolve to actually spend time, even at times seemingly to squander it, for the sake of purposes beyond your own—indeed, that occasionally subvert your own (remember the good Samaritan?). That person you think is such a bore but who always wants to talk with you: Why not really listen to him? Why not give him, not just your time, but yourself—your attention, your affection, the gift of your curiosity and inquisitiveness?
In God’s economy, to redeem time, you might just have to waste some.
Try this for a week, giving the gift of yourself first to God and then to others. Be generous with time.
See if your world isn’t larger by this time next week.
SIX
WE’RE NOT IN EGYPT ANYMORE:
Stopping to Remove the Taskmasters
Michele has an identical twin, Nicole. Both are beautiful. Early on, I was always stumped by who was who and which was which. They’re mirror images: the high, fine cheekbones and the soft, dark eyes, the lilting cadence of speech, the delicate artistry and polished musicianship—these are perfectly duplicated in each.
Around that time, my daughters were captivated by a remake of the movie Parent Trap, in which actress Lindsay Lohan single-handedly portrays, with the help of special camera effects, identical twins. The story revolves around the twins’ elaborate scheme to pose as each other, a scheme so flawlessly executed that they fool their own parents. Watching it with my daughters, I wondered if Michele and Nicole ever did that, pretended to be the other, just to mess with our heads. Back then, I figured I’d be an easy rube.
But as I got to know the twins better (especially Michele, who goes to church where I’m a pastor; Nicole lives in another town and visits only from time to time), I began to see subtle but distinct differences. Their smiles are not exactly alike. They carry themselves with enough degree of difference that you can distinguish one from the other just by watching their postures, their gestures, their expressions, the way they walk. You can tell by listening to the timbre and texture of their voices. In so many ways they are the same, yet in so many ways each is unique—it’s like hearing a single Mozart piece played by two different but equally proficient orchestras.
I’ve known the twins, especially Michele, for close to a decade now. It would take great cunning indeed for me to mistake one for the other.
The Bible provides two complete renderings of the Ten Commandments, one in Exodus 20, the other in Deuteronomy 5. (Deuteronomy literally means “the second law,” or “the law once over.”) The two renderings are virtually identical. They’re conjoined twins, separated by a clean, almost invisible cut. The two versions are so close that the slightest variations between them, like a birthmark on one that�
�s missing on the other, take on large significance. After long association, you can easily spot one from the other.
The two Sabbath commands feature a crucial variation. Exodus says this:
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (vv. 8–11)
Deuteronomy says this:
Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. (vv. 12–15)
Exodus grounds Sabbath in creation. Deuteronomy grounds it in liberation. Exodus remembers Eden, Deuteronomy Egypt. In Exodus, Sabbath-keeping is about imitating divine example and receiving divine blessing. In Deuteronomy, it is about taking hold of divine deliverance and observing divine command.
Exodus looks up. Deuteronomy looks back. Exodus gives theological rationale for rest, and Deuteronomy historical justification for it. One evokes God’s character, the other his redemption. One calls us to holy mimicry—be like God; the other to holy defiance— never be slaves again. One reminds us that we are God’s children, the work of his hands, the other that we are no one’s chattel, not Pharaoh’s, not Nebuchadnezzar’s, not Xerxes’, not Beelzebub’s.
The Rest of God Page 9