And the point is...?

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

A month ago I sat in this orange and green, pheasant-decorated armchair, frantically typing my little Medieval heart onto the page of yet another paper. "Ugh," I repeatedly thought to myself. "I wish I could be doing something else right now - like drawing or writing a story, or cooking."

Yesterday I had a pretty well-rounded day. I spent some time preparing for the course I'm the tutor marker for this summer. I answered a few e-mails. I prepared for the DVBS teacher's meeting. I cleaned the dishes and re-lemoned the linoleum beneath our door to keep the ants out. I even spent time reading the Word and praying. But when that was finished, and I had no other responsibilities, I wandered aimlessly around the house. Should I draw? I looked down at the scene I had started a number of months ago, now about two thirds finished. "But what's the point?" I wondered. "So I draw this, and in fifty years it gets thrown out in the trash - what's the point?" These thoughts kept coming back to me as I considered other things with which I might occupy myself.

Later in the evening, when my husband dropped me off at the skytrain, I was expressing to him my frustration with this strange depression - this purposeless in living. "At least with your paintings," I said to him, "You get paid for them." He shook his head and said, "That doesn't give them any more meaning than yours. They'll still end up getting thrown out in a few years. I make them for someone else - whom I don't know - to hang on their wall. To be consumed - but neither producer nor consumer is doing anything terribly significant." Except of course for trying to make meaning in their life through controlling the material things around them. Josh continued, "I paint them, so that I can make money to buy food, so that I can stay alive to paint more paintings. The meaning has to come from somewhere else - and it does. You have to entrust yourself to God, and entrust to Him to your time and what you are doing with it, to build a foundation for the eternal."

The point is, nothing here will last. Ultimately. But everything here - everything around us, what we do with ourselves, what we think, buy, build etc - can become a part of the kingdom-building if we are surrendering it to Him and working it in His power. It can lay the foundation for the work that we will get to do in heaven, that work which will be so saturated with God's glory that its meaning will be radiant to everyone who comes in contact with it. But it starts here.

My husband said to me, "Go, write a story that is going to make a thirteen year old girl get excited about being a Christian."

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