It’s the middle of the day. I have dinner to cook, laundry to fold, weeds to pull. And let’s not even mention paperwork. These and other voices clamor for my immediate attention.
“Pick me!”
“No, me, I’ve been waiting longer!”
“No, ME! I said it first!”
But I choose writing you, because I can’t shake the reminder I read this morning:
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
Jesus’ words in Luke 12:48b
With what have I been entrusted? A lifetime of stories, a platform from which to share them, and the time in which to do so. A computer. The prayers of dear people who repeatedly steer me back to the need to faithfully write.
Yet I have come at my blogging in fits and starts. What prevents me from seeing scribbled notes through to a completed essay? Any number of reasons: The elusive ideal of Perfect which always, always hijacks the value of the Good Enough. The belief someone else out there has already said it, or said it better, and with prettier pictures. The conviction that, after all this time, whatever is written now had better be brilliant. And shouldn’t I wait until I can give it my uninterrupted time and attention? Tomorrow, likely, or the day after, at the latest.
Also, there’s this distracting fly buzzing in my office, unbidden, unwelcome.
Argh! Ok, let me just jump in anyway, flail around and add my imperfect voice to the choir.
It’s dawning on me afresh that we have stories to tell and songs to sing which we are singularly qualified to voice because they are ours. We have lived them and learned from them. The more we speak up and sing out, the more we can learn from one another. The one who scrawls in crayon doesn’t take the place of the one who composes in calligraphy, and both can hear from the one who texts by phone. We need it all.
I took this picture of my brother and his son playing everyone’s favorite piano classic “Heart and Soul” back when little Timmy could only play the top hand with one finger. But it didn’t stop him from playing his part, and he didn’t wait until he was able to use both hands all over the keyboard, as his dad could. Nowadays he plays in the worship band at church, but imagine if he had waited a dozen years to get started. There would have been all this silence in the waiting for the Someday.
The more I sit here trying to focus while that thing flits from window to window — zzzzzt! zzzzt! — the more it represents to me the incessant nattering that defeats and deflates when I undertake a good, hard thing. Maybe you can relate. You have good, hard stories to tell and songs to sing, that only you can tell and sing. And maybe you, too, understand the presence of unwelcome deterrents when you contemplate clearing your throat and beginning. I know often, when I try to swat down the noises of regret, self-doubt, perfectionism, I miss and have to start over. You, too?
For the sake of doing our best with all we’ve been entrusted, extending hope and finishing well, let’s resolve to fight the distractions and deterrents. Let’s keep getting out of our chairs to kill those suckers flat.
“Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!”
Matthew 25:21