July 28, 2022
On Being Needy
(Yikes ! How is this possible that I forgot - AGAIN - to send this letter I wrote for you last weekend. I blame moving)
I am writing this letter from the front seat of our minivan. Our Honda Odyssey has put on the miles—kilometers—in the last several weeks. After we left Toronto on Friday, July 8th, we drove east to pick up our youngest boys from summer camp in the Adirondacks. Then we headed south to Columbus, Ohio, for a couple of nights before finally arriving in Cincinnati on Monday, July 11th. We spent that week working around a crew of painters to move everything into the house. God bless the moving team who, once they realized the large moving truck would not make it up our steep, curvy laneway, rented a smaller shuttle truck to move the furniture and boxes. With two men down, they worked twice as hard.
I am writing this letter from the front seat of our minivan because after the week of moving into our new house in Cincinnati, we piled in the car again and drove to Asheville, North Carolina, for five days of vacation. My husband, ever the practical one, thought this might not be the most opportune time for a getaway. In one sense, he was absolutely right. We needed to get settled. And on the other hand, what seemed to also matter in this season of craziness was getting some time to rest and be together as a family apart from moving tasks. This morning, I journaled about some of the most meaningful moments of our vacation. At the top of the list was the filming I did yesterday when four of our five children were doing cooperative trick shots in the pool.
I’ve certainly lived crazy seasons of life before: working fulltime while finishing graduate school; raising five children seven and younger. Life’s chronic busyness has made me an avid reader of time management books, someone who is perpetually conscious of the ticking of time. (I write about this compulsion in my forthcoming book, In Good Time.) Until writing my book, I was firmly convinced that there was always a strategy (or consumer product) to tame time’s unruliness.
I don’t think that way anymore. I’ve come to see some of the mistaken assumptions of the time management conversation: its individualist bent, its assumed privilege, its idolatry of productivity. In fact, I’m learning better ways to inhabit time: receiving my limits, relying on others, resisting the lie that I can work as hard as any machine. I’ve begun recovering a better vision for human flourishing, one that looks like the growth of the tree figured in Psalm 1.
In May, the Gospel Coalition published a review I wrote of Andy Crouch’s book, The Life We’ve Looking For,and I’m thinking of this book again, in the wake of the busy weeks we’ve been living. I am a huge fan of Crouch’s work, and I jumped at the chance when an editor asked for a review of his most recent work. While this book does recapitulate themes from earlier books (about the perils of the technological life), it also introduced a concept I hadn’t encountered before, even if I’d heard the word.
Mammon.
“[According to Crouch, w]hat’s most frightening about the technological life,” I write in my review, “is not that we might become perennially distracted. The true peril is how autonomous we might aspire to be. Mammon rules in a money economy, whereby we ‘get things done, often by means of other persons, without the entanglements of friendship.’ To have money in our pockets is to relieve ourselves of relying on other people. In other words, we don’t love money only for the niceties it buys us. We worship Mammon for the ways it affords our independence, this freedom to free-wheel through life without the suffering any interruption to our well-laid plans.
What beats at the heart of the technological empire is a dark, demonic power, one that promises the kingdoms of the world for a little bit of servitude. It promises control at the cost of connection. And maybe what’s scariest about Crouch’s perceptive diagnostic is that at root, this technological is not a behavior problem; it’s a desire problem. The answer is not to simply put down our phones and monitor screen time. It’s to treasure the kingdom pearl of belonging to God and to others.”
Over the last month, we’ve certainly spent a lot of money on carry-out. But mammon hasn’t ruled the day. What’s also been true is that we’ve relied on the help of others in ways that have often felt humbling. People have brought us meals, put our family up for multiple nights, boarded our dog, picked up our mail. We’ve been needy, and we’ve admitted it.
Dependence is rarely advised by the time management experts, except in the case of securing paid help. But as I’m discovering, human community, for all its interruptions and contingencies, also provides us the sheltering support we need in fragile, vulnerable seasons.
In other words, alone isn’t always the best way to get things done.
Yours,
Jen
Suggested Reading
Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant.
John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer.