Not for the lazy soul

I have to admit that I still struggle with the title of this posting.  I don’t know how to convey what I am trying to without offending people.  I am not proposing that we are better than anyone else.  We came up with this title while looking only at ourselves and it doesn’t reflect or imply anything about anyone else.  As we have stated before, we are personalizing our sustainable living goals.  What I am trying to say is that I cannot cling to my past practices, the results of being lazy on the inside.  We had to counter that drive.  Those that know us may see things differently, but the hard reality was that we didn’t choose more sustainable patterns in our lives because deep down I was lazy.  Don’t confuse motivation or drive with laziness—I have to continuously remind myself that we do nothing small and everything is possible with God.  We cannot be afraid of what might happen because we don’t want to address issues as they arrive. 

Two verses that we come back to are: Proverbs 21:25- “The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hands refuse to labor” and Colossians 3:23 “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men”.  The latter verse was written specifically about slavery.  But taking that context and applying it to our own lives just makes sense…we are slaves.  One important fact that we have come to realize is that the work is never done.  You can make list after list, cross out item after item, but the work is never done.  As we said earlier, relying on God is hard. You are going to have to work.

In addition to the hard work, you will get burned, accept it and move on.  This is an underlying characteristic and a frequent teaching moment that we share with our kids.  One of my favorite and frequently used saying is “Our actions are not defined by the actions of others”.  Of course I usually follow up with our actions WILL not be defined by the actions of others.  One example that we use to put this into practice is the person standing on the corners of the off-ramps panhandling.  We may have strong feelings with what the people are doing with the money, but what if it is Jesus asking for money on the corner?  We also don’t want to make that call, I would rather help and get burned than not help and find out later that I judged the person incorrectly…as if I am qualified to judge that person’s intentions in the first place.  Our actions will not be defined by the actions of others.

It is hard work.  During one of my wife’s and my brainstorm sessions, I was feeling pretty drained and started questioning if we could maintain what we were proposing.  My wife reminded me of what we call the Summer Camp paradigm.  Both of us have worked in summer camps (that is actually where we met) and both found it profoundly exhausting, but inspiring and life changing.  During our work at the camp, we had no exposure to commercialism, little to no carbon footprint. We managed to be fed, had clean clothes, dressed simply, worked 12-16 hours 6 days a week.  We also had clean air, chapel daily, and ample opportunities to work hard.  We didn’t feel tired, we felt fulfilled.