For Somewhere and For Someone

A few months back, a friend led me through a prayer ritual designed for releasing burdens. She invited me to write down the responsibilities and roles that I inhabit in life and then to physically carry them to a place of surrender. As I walked through the exercise, I was surprised to notice that the things that weighed on me most heavily had little to do with the tasks that occupy my days, the things I am actually doing. The heaviness came from the nots of my life—the awareness of things I am not doing and things I cannot be.

I suspect I’m not the only who know how it feels to be crushed by the weight of not-ness.

One of the most difficult teachings of Jesus is a parable in Matthew 25 in which Jesus describes a scene of kingly judgment. In this famous story, the fates of the subjects are decided based on whether they fed the hungry, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, visited the sick and the prisoner.

This story isn’t hard to understand at all. All the difficulty lies in practice. I take Jesus at his word that all these acts are of critical importance to faith. The trouble is, there are so many things on this list. And getting into a prison takes time. So does cooking for people. So does figuring out who needs clothes and where to send them.  

Every day each of us must choose what specific actions to take in the face of an infinite array of other things we could be doing. There is no shortage of worthy causes. I find myself constantly haunted by the prickling awareness of all the vitally important things that I did not do today, all the worthy causes that I did not prioritize. Sometimes I read this parable and want to cry, “Truly, Jesus, who is possibly equal to all of this?!”   

But it suddenly occurred to me recently that I had made an interpretative leap in turning Matthew 25 into a daily checklist, with respect to which I and everyone else I know is inevitably doomed to fail for want of infinite time and resources. Maybe the Way of Jesus is not best understood as a string of separate tasks and obligations. Maybe what Jesus is doing in Matthew 25 is fixing a direction of orientation, a north star by which to orient a life.

No one can do everything at once. No one has infinite time or energy. But all of us have an existence to live in the world. Jobs we work. Places we live. People we pass. Decisions we make about what to do with the hours and resources available to us.

The default mode of human living is to make ourselves the center of existence—what do I want, what can I get, what honor will I win? But Jesus suggests that the movement of his true followers lives will be toward others-centeredness. Our choices, large and small, will be made in consciousness of our neighbors’ needs and with commitment to their wholeness. The question that emerges from the parable isn’t, “Can I do everything at once?” The question is, “Is the something I’m doing fundamentally grounded in awareness of others, for the sake of others, extending the blessings of Jesus’ reign?”

The truth is, not all of us have the same number of options at any given moment. Some of us have an array of vocational choices we can make with a grand sense of mission. Others exist in circumstances that leave us with a limited number of things we can do to keep food in the mouths of our children.  Neither of these positions are inherently closer or farther from the Jesus Way. What distinguishes the Jesus Way in either circumstance is the orientation toward others, for others, wherever we are. In both cases the call of discipleship can be fulfilled.

Sometimes the noblest thing we can do is the most small and ordinary, submitting to the unwanted yoke of relationship or circumstance. We are here, perhaps, due to no choice of ours. But we can choose to be here oriented toward others. Meanwhile some of the grandest missional callings can drift off course. We can claim we’re in it for God but end up more focused on the personal high of accomplishing our goals than on actual love of the neighbor we’ve been commissioned to serve.

Perhaps the relentless focus on our not-ness is a legalistic distraction from a liberatory reorientation of all of life. Wherever you are, whatever your situation, whatever you do, be for others for Jesus’ sake. Be about their good. Be about their flourishing. If you are doing this, you are in the right story. You are learning a habit of being, an orientation in the world, that emulates the incarnate Jesus, who in his earthly life was not everywhere at once but somewhere in particular. You are becoming like Jesus, who in his human limitation did not do everything but something, for someone, day after day, that left them more full or whole or free than before they encountered him.