Work and Fear and Failure
How some writers should not so keenly penetrate into the inner darkness of my mind and should just leave me alone and stuff.
When you type “work” into the free picture search box, this is one of the images that pops up, I kid you not:
If you scroll and scroll, 99.9 percent of the images are of people sitting in front of laptops or laptops sitting by themselves. I had in mind to hunt out an image of someone hoeing a garden, or a person working in a factory, or a woman doing dishes, or a young man collecting grocery carts or something. But no, the only kind of work that really matters is the kind where you look cute with your coffee. Weirdly enough, I am literaleigh sitting in such an establishment with a latte looking super cute right this minute.
So anyway, my piece in Christianity Today about Kevin De Young’s excellent short book, Impossible Christianity, is out. Take a look:
How is it that I can wake up at four in the morning and still fail to accomplish even a quarter of the tasks on my list?” I commiserated to a friend at church. Both of us were depressed about how we can cram so much activity into a day and still come up short by bedtime. The problem, I said, waving my arms, is the new law of self-care, the mountain that “healthy” people feel the need to climb. The law includes activities like daily exercise, prayer, Bible study, weekly small group attendance, and proper sleep hygiene. It mandates keeping on top of the dishes and laundry, maintaining intentional in-person and online relationships, praying for the persecuted church, and asking my neighbor if she’s ever heard of Jesus. How can mere mortals manage all this in their nonworking hours? All I do, I complained, is apologize for being a colossal failure. My friend patted my hand and recited her own litany—the same in spiritual substance, though differing in particulars.
Read the rest here—if you have time and you want to. I really did love the book. It was just the tweak I needed to gently back up off the failure narrative I have too often preached to myself.
I’m sure you’re familiar with it. It’s that thing where you start out trying to obey Jesus by following him through the wilderness but then forget what he actually wants and gradually replace his stuff with your own. “Loving your neighbor as yourself” starts to include curiosities like buying new living room furniture because you’ve nurtured a dissatisfaction for your own and you feel cruddy having people over but then you can’t actually buy new furniture because you can’t find any you like and then you have to buy shoes for all the children and so you go to bed crushed by disappointment by your own “failure.”
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