Sorry, but I’m not going to write a blog post today. I have too many other things to do. My wife needs me to help and spend time with her, instead of just time beside her while I type. My kids need me to be their friend, not stare at a screen. I need to draw illustrations for my next book if I’m on my computer, not write blogs. There are pecans on the ground to harvest, a house to clean, and taxes to do. There are comics to read and Olympics to watch. So I’m not doing a blog today.
How busy life gets for us in this century! We have advantages folk could scarce dream of a century ago: digital power at our fingertips, comforts our grandparents would envy and entertainments they hardly imagined possible. These things are tremendous blessings. But they’ve cluttered our lives too. Many of them have a hidden cost, counted in minutes wasted. How easy it is to say “checking my FB will only take a few minutes, and then I’ll read the kids that book.” After an hour, we get off the computer to put them to bed and hope to read the book tomorrow. Time slips by relentlessly, the clock ticks off seconds we can never get back, whether we spent them on useful things or wasted them on useless ones. And how restless the blessing of technology has made us! It’s very difficult for many of us in this fast-paced, computer-driven, entertainment-addicted society to spend an hour sitting outside with a sketchbook or chatting face-to-face with a friend.
Sometimes we need to slow down. We need to make margin in our lives. Our frantic souls need the healing of downtime. In fact, they need the best rest: resting in Jesus. Abiding in Him slows my frenetic soul, even when my body has lots to do. His eternal victory on my behalf puts my temporal activities in perspective and makes me less freaked out if they don’t get done. Knowing He has pardoned my sin, and cleansed me, and secured heaven for me lets me mentally be at rest even when there’s a lot to do. That’s because all my work becomes a side note to the great and eternal victory He’s already won for me. It’s not useless. On the contrary, it’s infused with eternal meaning now that as part of the thread in the eternal narrative Christ is weaving with our lives.
So, that’s why I’m not going to blog today, because… Oh wait… Hmm… Well, I hope you learned something from this blog I wasn’t going to write. Maybe next week I’ll try again to not write a post.
P.S. While you’re not reading the blog post I didn’t write today, enjoy this rare glimpse of Thorg from the upcoming Mubblefubbles novel.
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