I took part of last week off, just before Easter, and renovated our downstairs bathroom -an exercise in major frustration, minor satisfaction, and huge empathy for people who work in the trades. Simple plumbing (and the worst of it I paid someone else to do) forced me into contortions that my muscles are still recovering from, and fiddling with leaky joints and ill-fitting appliances tested my patience worse than Toronto traffic. It took longer than I had planned, cost more than I had budgeted, and resulted in less than I had dreamed. All the same, my son is thrilled – he’s got a snazzy bathroom mostly to himself; and my wife is thrilled – she does not have to put up with one more oafish man lumbering about in her bathroom, overusing the toilet paper, overshooting the toilet bowl, and spattering the mirror with toothpaste.
So I guess I’m thrilled.
Somebody asked me how doing ‘real work’ compared with pastoral ministry. It’s both better and worse. Better because, when you’re done, there’s something standing that, short of fire, tsunami, or earthquake, will still be standing next week, next year, next decade. You don’t, it feels, get that kind of permanence too often in my day job. There, things I build or renovate don’t usually hold together very long. Sermons that take hours to prepare are forgotten by those who hear them before they reach the parking lot. Counseling sessions that I pour my best into still end, sometimes, with the marriage dissolving or the person depressed. And so on. So there’s a certain joy in actually making something or fixing something that stays made or fixed.
But ‘real work’ is also worse. As much as I like walking into that bathroom and finding the sink I installed still upright and gleaming, time after time, I have no illusions that my installing it intersected eternity. That’s the joy I get in pastoral ministry: a word or deed here has the power to touch the inmost parts of a person’s heart, extend to the ends of the earth, and last forever.
None of that is true of my -bathroom renovation.
Here’s the really good part: all followers of Jesus have this inmost, utmost, eternal power. All of us, no matter what our day job, have opportunity to intersect eternity. Following Jesus means we steward this power well. We live by the Apostle Paul’s counsel:
“Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” (Colossians 4:2, 4-6).
Not everyone is good at trade work. Some, like me, can manage it, poorly. But all of us can heed Paul’s counsel. All of us can intersect eternity.
Then, even when your last renovation is in need of another renovation, you know that God has taken something you’ve done – a word, a deed – and made it stand in the heavens, and nothing on earth can remove it.
You can comment on this devotional online at:
http://thoughtsaboutgod.com/blog/2011/04/07/mb_intersecting-eternity/
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