At 8:30am on most Sunday mornings, you’ll find Ryan and I seated at a booth in our neighborhood bodega. Leaving behind our sleepy teenagers, we spend an hour and a half before church talking calendars and priorities. The table is taken up with Ryan’s personalized “Monk Manual,” a plastic three-ring binder full of pages he’s developed for himself, as well as my Planner Pad and journal. Somehow, in all that paper, we find room for the red plastic baskets containing our breakfast sandwiches.
This weekly Sunday planning has been our habit since we moved to Cincinnati, and it’s the first time in our married life that we’ve been consistent in this way. It’s just one of many habits that has developed from my rule of life practice. What are my deepest desires? What are creative ways to lean toward the transformation God has for me and my closest relationships?
A rule of life really does involve a calendaring component because its orientation, as upwards and inwards (as I wrote last week), is also outwards. What are the responsibilities to take up in time as we seek to live in faithful response to God’s voice? Ryan and I are prioritizing in new ways—like finally getting a five-day trip on the calendar for the two of us in August. I can see the enormous benefit of this practice of “putting first things first.”
But yesterday’s “meeting” didn’t go as usually planned. Yes, Steve and JP were in the adjacent booth, sipping coffee and playing a board game. Yes, we had our planners and journals with us and managed to talk about the week ahead. But we never got around to the newest element of this weekly meeting, which is the moment Ryan opens his computer and loads our household financial spreadsheet. We didn’t get around to talking about our spending and giving, as we normally like to, and this was because I needed to talk through some of the anxiety that I was struggling with.
Just when I had started to get some clarity on future writing projects, life was getting “lifey” again. Last week, it was confirmed that my mother needed two cataract surgeries—and I would need to hande all the administrative work and appointments to go with them. This wasn’t a responsibility I’d planned on, but it was here for me, ready or not. This was just as one of our college-aged children was planning a trip home to visit other universities, as she contemplated a transfer. Those visits would mean a drive to Chicago and Milwaukee and four days away from my desk. I wanted to help my mom and show up for my daughter in her decision-making process, but I also was feeling the burden of the creative projects I wanted to move forward. This wasn’t even to mention that another daughter was planning a wedding and I was hoping to be of help to her.
What space can be made when life gets lifey? I was feeling the burden of competing priorities and grappling with my limitations to meet the demands of any one of them.
“You’re going to just have to do the best you can,” Ryan reminded me. My best, in other words, would not be the ideal. The limits imposed on my time and energy seemed to guarantee that. And he was right, of course, though I confess I am still learning the wisdom required for such compromises. Compromise is such a dirty word: in politics, in faith. But isn’t compromise necessary in human life, whose realities rarely accommodates our ideals?
It’s often required that we show up to our complicated, complex lives with compromises of small and flawed efforts. This isn’t to say that we indulge laziness or irresponsibility, but it is to say that we must acknowledge our creatureliness, our finiteness, and the boundary limits of our caring. I can’t care as actively as I might wish beyond some of these more immediate responsibilities right now. To get my mother to her necessary appointments, to be present for my daughters in their important life seasons, to continue committing to my vocational calling of creative work, there are so many things I can’t do.
“I’m afraid of disappointing people,” I told Ryan. And that was good to say aloud. I am afraid of disappointing friends I can’t schedule coffee with. I am afraid of disappointing younger women I want to invest in because I can’t take more relational initiative. Maybe I am even afraid of disappointing God because there are so many people to love and such limited time with which to love them.
I felt better, admitting all of this to Ryan—and remembering, yet one more time, that “the boundaries lines have fallen for me in pleasant place,” (Psalm 16:6). I would have to accept the limitations of my life, rather than reject them. I would have to trust. And wasn’t that at the bottom of everything in our life with God? Trust. Trust in the goodness and wisdom and involvement of God. Trust that small, regular efforts matter. Trust that perseverance in “lifey” seasons is doing a good work in us, perhaps most importantly inviting us to trust.
I was reading Robert Farrar Capon on the Parable of Talents this week, and he reiterated this theme of trust in his reading of the familiar story that involves a master’s trust of talents, into the hands of his servants, and his later accounting of their investment. Here are a couple of lines I copied in my journal, which speak to Capon’s imagining of the master’s rebuke of the third servant who did not invest his one talent but buried it instead.
“I asked you to do business . . . to exercise a little pragmatic trust that I meant you well and that I wouldn’t mind if you took some risks with my gift of a lifetime.”
“When I give you a gift, I expect you to do business with it, to keep it moving . . .not just to keep it to yourself in some damned napkin.”
“I can accept absolutely everything every distrust.”
I can see my invitation—and I wonder if you can find yours.
So good. Thank you Jen, for modeling responsiveness to life's "lifey"-ness in your season of life. It helps me see the way in my own.
This is beautiful and so encouraging. I needed this today!