It’s an interesting time right now in my household. After weeks (and weeks) of waiting, we are making progress on the Big Freeze-damaged bathrooms.
Anticipating a time when we will not have to get in line to take a shower makes the noise, smell, and thick clouds of dust almost friendly-feeling. But the house is crowded during the day; many strangers coming in and out with drywall and lumber and buckets of paint; not much quiet.
Similarly, Maggie is well and truly in the thick of High School Life. Softball play-offs (three and a half hours each way Thursday), choir performances, final exams… She is out every night, almost; her calendar looks as crowded and sounds as noisy as this construction-site house.
Crowded House / Beehive Busy / Loud Life
These situations have me cogitating a great deal on the effects of crowdedness – what it means to live in busyness, submerged in noise and labor.
On the one hand, a beehive of activity indicates things happening. Our bathrooms are taking shape – Maggie is learning and striving – this crowdedness connotes productivity.
On the other hand, crowded houses and crowded days create an exhaustion that is only partially linked to physical exertion.
Rocking Chair Wisdom
One morning this week, my cherished buddy Kate came over for coffee. We escaped the hullabaloo of the house by sitting on the back patio. As we rocked in our rocking chairs, Kate shared a special ministry opportunity that had literally come knocking at her door recently. She’d made a new friend, and helped that new friend in a myriad of ways, and it had all begun by her answering a knock at the front door of her house.
Later, I mused to myself that nobody who tried to knock at my door right now would be heard over the power tools and mariachi music inside. If anyone came looking for a drink of a water or a friend here, what would she find? A crowded house too noisy to notice her.
Of course, I understand that construction projects (and high school years) are specific, circumscribed seasons. They do not last forever. (Thank God.)
But as I reflect on crowdedness, the temporary variety, I confess I recognize crowdedness, the chronic variety, splashed all over time generally. While the pandemic cleared crowded calendars – cruelly so, for too many people – the return to normal can look like a return to max-capacity. Life as beehive. Activity, progress, vitality – but also noise, fatigue, and no margins for downtime.
Beehives produce much that tastes sweet, but beehives preclude much that brings peace. For humans, made in God’s image, perpetual buzz and great quantities of honey cannot replace space to think deeply, pray, and rest.
Kate introduced me to a concept a few years back that has worked on me ever since: availability. Being available to God, available to be useful, available to respond to God’s leading. Jesus, Kate pointed out to me, was imminently available.
Jesus: The Interruptible God-Man
Initially I found this confusing, because the Jesus I see in scripture was nothing if not a busy man. Jesus’s crowded life involved incessant crowds following Him everywhere He went, and incessant demands on Him to be doing, doing, doing, 24/7.
Jesus was the beehive – providing sustenance and shelter to everyone who circled around Him!
Jesus’s Busyness… versus my own
But I am realizing that there are critical distinctions between Jesus’s busyness and my own.
- Jesus was always clear about His mission. He was never distracted or disoriented. By contrast, I tend to try to multi-task to the point of incoherence… and I am prone to losing track of my destination. (The spiritual equivalent of walking into a room and then standing, clueless, while you try to remember why you are there.)
- Jesus was always in step with the Father’s perfect plan. He was obedient “to the point of death.” I, however, am all too frequently disobedient to the point of banality. Jesus focused on eternal truth; I often default to this-moment-convenience.
- Jesus’s busyness never usurped the place of prayer in Jesus’s routine. Time and again, the gospels record Jesus staying up late or getting up early to go away to a deserted place by Himself, for prayer. Again, my tendency is the opposite. When I get worn out by my self-imposed busyness, my instinct is not to stay up later or get up earlier to re-charge with alone time with God. Rather, my instinct is to squeeze as many extra minutes of sleep into the scant hours available to me.
Perhaps because of these critical differences between Jesus’s busyness and mine, Jesus retained the capacity to be imminently available even in the midst of beehive activity. And that capacity was used, time and time again, for “interruptions” to be become transformations.
Transformational Interruptions
The woman at the well (John 4). Jairus’s daughter and the woman with the hemorrhage (Matthew 9). The Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7). The Widow of Nain (Luke 7). Multiple sufferers of leprosy, blindness, deafness, paralysis. All of these figures in the gospels were NOT on Jesus’s agenda. Rather, they interrupted His teaching ministry, they called to Him from the roadside where He was traveling to somewhere else, they irritated His disciples by bringing “trivial” matters to the feet of the Master.
And in each and every case, Jesus was ready – He was equipped not just with miraculous divine power, but with basic human resources of well-rested, well-prayed-up connection to God – so Jesus met these “interruptions” as One available and eager to pour into each person, each situation, the love and healing the Father intended.
What it means to be busy, like Jesus
This new understanding of the way Jesus’s busyness and Jesus’s availability co-existed consistently has convicted me on several points.
As in all things, if I want to grow up to be like Jesus, then I need to follow Jesus’s actual example rather than hoping Jesus will bless what I’m already doing. Availability – being interrupt-able – is a requirement of discipleship, not an optional extra. If Jesus prioritized the people who interrupted His plans for the day, then who am I to find interruptions annoying?
But at the same time, if Jesus counseled “rest” to His disciples and modelled routine alone-time with the Father, then who am I to think I can skimp on either?
I need to re-order the way I conceptualize the future and nail it down on the calendar: My habitual method (deciding what I want to do and accommodating what the girls tell me they want to do and making sure it can all fit alongside what Mark wants to do – and then asking God to give me strength to do it all) is backwards.
I should first ask God what He is doing, and how He desires us to join Him in that activity. Then I should weigh each potential commitment in prayer (and not assume that something “fitting” on the calendar means it’s a good “fit” for us). I should see the days as finite periods of time and ourselves as finite creatures bound by time – and curtail my tendency to see “too much” as a dare to answer head-on.
Possibilities… and peace, too
Some seasons of this life are going to be beehive-busy. But that doesn’t mean that ALL seasons of this life are supposed to be beehive-busy! Compulsive calendar-cramming makes a casualty of both my availability to God and my obedience to God regarding daily devotion.
One day (soon) the construction site here will transition to a home. One day (all too soon!) Maggie will graduate from high school and launch into an adult life. But neither of those shifts will guaranty a cessation of beehive busyness or an increase in my availability to God. I have to choose both, daily, for either to be a reality in my life.
This necessity of choosing applies, culture-wide, circa 2021. Let’s be honest: we haven’t had nearly as many choices to make recently. Our calendars have been uncharacteristically uncluttered, involuntarily. As a people, we have been more available – more interruptible – than at any point in my memory. The tragic, costly losses wrought by Covid-19 have occurred alongside an enforced “pause” in the culture.
As our world begins to “open up” again, post-pandemic, I pray that new possibilities do not automatically become same-old-compulsions. I pray that our rediscovered freedoms do not segue into same-old-enslavements. I pray that we will approach our planning in a posture of prayer, assuming that there will be interruptions – and eagerly anticipating that God will use our availability for His glory.
The beehive model works great for bees. For humans, balancing work with rest and building availability to God into the core of our calendar will put us in better position to experience the truth of scripture:
“ … with honey from the Rock I would satisfy you.”
Psalm 81:16
