Since my last
post on this topic, I thought I had made progress. After listening to several people’s advice, I started trying to do things differently to help my feeling of constant overload without making myself feel irresponsible. For example, I started consciously making things for dinner that yielded leftovers so I could enjoy nights without cooking while still eating delicious home-cooked meals.
It’s been going pretty well up until recently (tonight) when I had yet another meltdown. You see, Levi’s work schedule changed after my last responsibilititis post and he started taking classes at OCCC toward his paramedic certification, which means that just about the only time he has at home is filled by sleeping, eating breakfast and working out. He used to have time to help with dishes, laundry and sweeping the floors, but now I am responsible for almost every home task. Thankfully, I haven’t had to start mowing the lawn…yet!
Tonight after working an hour later than usual, I came home to two unexpected bills that were wrongly charged us, meaning I now, in addition to normal chores, need to spend several hours on the phone with several different parties to get the errors fixed. After calling said parties, I discovered everyone was already closed for the day. A feeling of exhaustion at the thought of all I was responsible to do overwhelmed me and I took an hour-long nap.
Strangely (not really), the nap didn’t help remove any of my responsibilities, but it did help me get back into the right perspective. After a trip to Braum’s for a chocolate shake (that would surely help, right?), I filled up the bathtub with the hottest water I could and settled in to do my daily Bible reading.
I’ve been following our church’s read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan, and although it’s been great, I can’t say that I read something every night that is quite as applicable to my life at this moment as tonight’s reading. Tonight, part of the reading was in Ecclesiastes where I found this verse:
“For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” – Ecc. 4:8b
This particular passage discusses a family-less man asking this question, but I felt it was still applicable to me. After all, for whom have I been toiling and depriving myself of pleasure? My first obvious answer was Levi, but when I looked more closely at my motives, I found that I’ve actually been doing it for me.
You see, I want to be Wonder Wife. I want to be the one who has it all together, even when she has little help from her husband (not for his lack of willingness, but rather a lack of time). I want to be the person who always has a clean, picked-up, cutely-decorated house because that makes me look good (even though we haven’t even had people over to see how good I look because of Levi’s packed schedule). I want Levi to see how hard I work during my off-work time because I don’t feel right about sitting around while he’s working so hard. I want to feel like I deserve the appreciation he gives me for working so hard. How vain and selfish am I?
The funny thing about all this is, not only do I deprive myself of pleasure, but I also don’t even get pleasure from working so hard. I’m realizing how true Solomon’s repetitive statement in Ecclesiastes is that everything we do is like striving after the wind.
After coming to terms with all this tonight, I asked myself another question. If I don’t think I should be working so hard for myself, then who should I be working for? The answer is God.
Colossians 3:23-24 says “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”
You may be asking yourself if working for the Lord is even harder than working for men. In some cases, that may be true, but in my particular situation I believe that I need to continue to work hard, but realize that God actually does want me to enjoy this life that He has given me. Plus, I need to understand that working for the Lord means more than just doing my work in a way that is glorifying to Him. It means working for His approval instead of man's approval, which is far from what I've been doing.
Ecclesiastes 8:15 says “And I commend joy, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.”
This verse shows that joy is actually primary, not secondary to work. It “will go with him in his toil.” How can it go with you if you don’t have it to start with?
This has been a big breakthrough for me. I’m very thankful to God for speaking to me through is Word tonight, and I pray that this might not be a fleeting realization, but a life lesson that I continue to learn more deeply in the days, months and years to come and that it would ultimately make me more like Christ.
