The Work of the Failure

Last updated on: May 18, 2015 at 8:42 am by Anne Kennedy

The Work of the Failure 2015-05-18T08:42:24-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Parents en route. House not clean. Bags not packed. Laundry not done. Panic level high.

The most obvious course is to continue to lie here a bed, surfing the Internet and going back over all the lists twenty or thirty times. Maybe the lists will do themselves. Maybe I'll go upstairs and discover that I accidentally cleaned the children's rooms. Maybe the chairs aren't sticky after all.

Anyway, blogging will probably continue light this week. One thing I'm slowly discovering, because I'm dumb and I don't catch on very quickly, is that it's hard to do two things at once, particularly when either of them require the use of my mind. I can't really organize a trip and write books and stuff at the same time. I thought, for some reason, that I should be able to, and made that into my plan, and now that I've utterly failed I feel like a failing failure. But it may be that my original plan was flawed. It may be that I should only do one thing at a time. In this case, just go to DC and worry about blogging later. Even though, the whole way there and back, I will be anxiously thinking, “but what about my blog? I should stop driving and blog.”

This is a chronic problem for me, over budgeting reality. It probably comes from having so many children and being able, through sheer insane necessity, to nurse a baby and cook dinner at the same time. But those two things don't really go together, and just because you can do them together doesn't mean you should. Slowly the bundling of tasks has over taken me. If I go to church on Sunday morning, it is not only to worship God, it's to do like 20 other things because I think it will be easier to just do them while I'm there and then I won't have to make calls or go to church during the week. If I begin to do a day of school with the children, I think, oh, I'll just also sort all the toys while I'm giving that spelling test, because the test is boring and I'll be right there in the room, and it would be annoying to just sit there, giving the test. If I'm teaching Sunday school, I think, oh, I should make a card while I'm there because of all the paper and scissors being right there. But for real, I shouldn't do any of those things together. The spelling test should occur alone by itself. Sunday school should not be cluttered up with my own card making needs.

More also so, as I've tried to ramp up my various writing endeavors, I have not budgeted for the mental energy pay out required to put words on the page. I generally begin writing at six in the morning and write steadily until nine. Then I leap up and begin rushing around as if 9 am is the beginning point of the day. When I'm completely exhausted by two I can't understand it, thinking that I haven't done anything all day, when really, I have probably worked very hard, some of it with my actual mind. Feel dumb to be only sort of noticing this. Probably the whole world knows that you can't do two things at once and that some things that you like doing, like writing, count as work, even if you don't count them as work.

I do think about work a lot, as a Christian, and am often confused, not intellectually, but in the actual working out of my actual working. One of the most basic experiences of work, as I think about it, is futility. It doesn't matter how hard you work at something, it's going to eventually be destroyed. It might last for a few minutes, or a few years, but it's going to go up in a ball of fire or the tearing destruction of a little girl with a pair of scissors and a sour expression. You make a nice dinner in a clean kitchen, only to have the kitchen look like you never did anything in it ever. You expend yourself, with labor, and at the end of the day have nothing to show for it but your aching back and sore feet. I feel like I've read this in the bible somewhere, hmmmm.

I think this is why I obsessively love to think about the completed work of Jesus. That, when he ascended into heaven, he sat down. Always in the temple, the priest was always on his feet, working and working and sacrificing and burning incense and putting out the bread and lighting the lamps and then starting over again. There were no chairs, as Matt said somewhere in a sermon, in the Holy Place. None. No one was allowed to sit down because the work of atonement wasn't done. As soon as you had had your sins forgiven, you went out and sinned again. But Jesus came and said, “It is finished,” and then he sat down, on the right hand of the Father.

I just love to think of being in heaven, close to Jesus, sitting. In the meantime, I will get up and strive. Even though there's no way for me to complete all the work, both the work I think I should do and the work I can actually do, I will try really hard to finish it all, and then, at the end of the day, when it turns out I really am a failing failure, I will just smile and be happy because someday I will really get to sit down. And none of the work I'm doing matters that much now anyway because Jesus' was the only work that does burn up in a ball of fire and he did all his already.

Have a lovely day, and maybe week.

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