The United States is blessed, financially, more so than so many other countries. With that blessing comes an aggressive pursuit to have more….. more wealth, more luxuries, more stuff, more of anything and everything. Like so many others bred in an environment that has created a god out of money, and raised in a family of workaholics, I find immense satisfaction with my life knowing that my day planner is full and my time sparse. I can often make ,myself believe that I have everything I could possibly want, but perhaps the paradox is that in having ‘everything’, I don’t get to have anything. I own things. I possess things. But, if I never get to simply sit and remain silent and content, they are things I possess, but only that and nothing more.
So, in the midst of all the color-coded scribbles in my dearly beloved planner, I am trying something that doesn’t quite make sense to me. I’m going to schedule ‘nothing’ in my planner. Not that I’m going to make an attempt to have pages and pages of blankness, but that I will be scheduling in…. rest. I know it seems a bit odd to actively pursue being inactive. It sounds like a paradox or a ‘riddle of life’, but it really isn’t. This is something that I believe God has intended for me to do all along.
I recently went through a Bible devotion on the Sabbath. It wasn’t exactly the best study I’ve done, but it had so much truth in it that Sabbath isn’t about having a day off every week, as it is a matter of the heart. I have to have Sabbath in my heart in order for it to matter that I have it in my week. A month after that study, my pastor preached a sermon titled, “The Stop Strategy”, which really had nothing to do with the Sabbath, specifically, but the task that instantly came to my mind was planning. I am an exceptional planner. If there were a resume to my life, I would have the primary skill be “Planning”, followed by innumerable bulleted tasks and experiences of all my planning expertise. But there is no resume of life. There is only life. And now I have all of these bullet points and no resume on which to type them. It’s as though they aren’t the meaning of life, if you can imagine such a nightmare.
I know it shouldn’t be something I have to schedule in, and that it should actually be a ‘state of mind’, but sometimes, our minds need to be trained. And my mind has been trained, methodically and with great effort, to never stop, pause, break, sit or stand idle. As my father always said, “Why don’t you do something while you’re doing nothing?” Well, I think it’s time for me to do nothing, so that I can actually enjoy the somethings…. the so many somethings….. that I do.