One of the highlights of our service at Highview on Sunday was "Miss Rachel" leading our kids in that classic bit of crazy called "Hello...My Name is Joe and I Work in a Button Factory."
If you know it, the sing-song rhythm and the incremental frenzy is probably right now ear-worming through your head. For those who don't, basically it's a story song where Joe's boss comes along and gives him just one more thing to do each day, until it's actually impossible to keep up.
A repeated question from the boss is, "Are you busy?"
That word "busy" is often part of my conversations, both with folks asking the question, or, as often is the case, providing me with their assessment of my life by adding that little qualifier at the beginning, "too."
This is understandable, and by now I try to take it in stride. My God-given temperament, energies, and calling combine to keep me either robustly-occupied, or resting from being robustly-occupied on any given day. I honestly can't remember the last time I was bored. Oh, unless you count the teacher's strike in my last year of high school.
To bring this back to Joe's predicament, however, we should make sure that this isn't about who's busier than whom, how much or how little we get done in a day, or even about how well we may or may not be keeping up with all the demands of 'the boss.'
That was not the point of Pastor Erin's sermon, or why we were all joining the children in the cool calisthenics.
"[Christ] is before all things,
and in him all things hold together."
Colossians 1:17
The point was, you or I don't actually have to try to keep it together, no matter what the demands of our life right now.
That's Jesus' job.
Often we think otherwise. In fact, I have had to learn the hard way that the voice of 'the boss' in my own head was actually NOT Jesus. It was instead the voice of my own distorted perfectionism and workaholism. A voice that was fear-driven, not Spirit-led.
Jesus, on the other hand, was trying to get me to rest.
Because He's very competent as His job.
And He loves me.
Unlike Joe's boss, He never intends for us to get into that state where we're frantically flailing around.
Of course, we don't even have to have a lot of things on a list in order to find ourselves in that state. All it takes is for us to mistake ourselves for the one who should be in control of it all.
We're not. He is.
So whatever is on our lists for this Tuesday,
especially if it entails things that seem like they're spinning
in any direction that feels out of control,
I wish us all a button-free day,
to take our hands of that which we're not in charge of anyway,
and let God be God.
HIGHVIEW PEEPS
Our online Small Group is still wide open.
Thursday, February 29 from 10:00 to 11:15 a.m.
Digging a little deeper into Colossians 1:15-20.
PM me for the Zoom link.
We'd love to see you there.
No comments:
Post a Comment