Winter Sunshine

All right, there, babe. Here comes my first “comments,” though it’s up to you whether you want them publicly posted or not.

A card and $75?! Well, that truly is scandalous. What on earth were your supervisors thinking in rewarding you for good service? How could they have been so thoughtless?

OK, PB&J, indulge me for a minute. Temping sucks. Truly it does. I’ve had my fair share of filing, proofing and stuffing while holding increasingly agitated internal monologues.

“But you idiots don’t understand. I was the first reporter on the scene at the ’91 IRA bombing of Victoria Station! I was the last journalist to interview Governor Clinton before he announced his presidency! What makes you think I was actually destined to shuffle your faxes, you lazy peons? Haul those frontal lobes over here. Let’s compare cerebellar cortex furrows? No? Well, I didn’t think so.”

But I wonder …. I wonder if in my ample time spent in suffering subservience wasn’t exactly what I was supposed to be doing. In dedicating my heart to Jesus, I had to relinquish the concept that I actually knew what I was supposed to be doing when, despite education, training and experience. The lovely thing about practicing Christianity (and, let’s be honest, there can be so few moment to moment) is that you are always in the context of God’s will. You are always where you are supposed to be.

You and I are quote collectors. Over the years we’ve shared the funny, the profound, the profane. Rarely do we share those that disgust, and the following disgusted me for many a moon:

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." (Martin Luther King Jr.)

I truly loathed the idea that there was a possibility that I might be called as a street sweeper – or the 21st-century feminine equivalent – the admin. And perhaps because I feared that distinction so very much, I was called to do just that. Depsite skill sets that so suggested otherwise, I was made to answer phones, to greet visitors, to arrange luncheon trays. I had a choice: I could be bitter or I could be humble.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum, as a vice president for a high-profile organization, I see how valuable those acts of service are and I hope I discharged my duties well once upon a time. I hope I chose humility more often than not.

Acts of service. There’s that hateful little phrase again. Hateful to my mind because I feel I do so few acts of service in Christ’s name, so few church-prescribed acts of service, I mean. And it needles me. It truly does. (Should I be reading more in church? Teaching more classes? Greeting more visitors?)

Yet there again is Jesus. Not washing his disciples feet. Not biding Lazarus to quit his tomb. Not handing arms outstretched as the weight of his body suffocates his lungs. There is his awl in hand, pondering over his purpose as he constructs a table. Another table. A table much like the chair the week before and the week before that. Serving God in period of time we know so little about. I have to wonder, though, if he believed he was in the right place at the right time.

It calls to mind the years of Moses’ exile, the months of Esther’s preening.

Truly we can agree that they were called to more. And truly we can agree that they were exactly where they needed to be at that time. Their submission to those moments can be regarded as holy acts of service to God, and I believe their obedience during what they must have regarded as wasted days will be credited as sacred.

Why did God take his children through 40 years of wandering? Why leave Peter first to fish for years on end?

Why, today, do so many of our best and brightest file?

A final quote for a Friday – Paul of Timothy:

I have no one else like Timothy, who genuinely cares for your welfare. All the others care only for themselves and not for what matters to Jesus Christ

My assumption is that he not only behaved as a servant of Christ, he thought that way, too. May it be so for us all.

Sorry about the one long block of text. I don't have the time to worry about tags right now.

(The Word file is beautiful, though.)

Well, OK. But if I want to hold increasingly agitated internal monologues and make snide remarks on my blog while performing such acts of service, would that be OK, too?

And is it really an act of service if you get paid? Just wondering...

Yup. To both questions ...