The Task at Hand

Why it’s so hard for me to say yes to my kids when they invite me to play I will never understand.  I mean, it’s not like I enjoy emptying the dishwasher or cleaning the toilet.  But the urgency of the always-available tasks somehow offers an excuse to foster my complacency and avoid the nuisance of having to run until my sides hurt or the burden of watching Pocahontas for the three hundred forty-ninth time.

And so, when one of them asks, “Mommy, do you wanna’ play with me?” I say “No” more often than I’d like to admit.  And I give in to the selfish complacency that justifies itself.  Pretending to be an important task to be done.  As if completing household chores holds the same importance as bestowing value and worth to my child.  The kind that lets her know that she herself is more important than any task that lay before me. 

It’s an age-old problem, really.  The problem of task-orientation that creates a distorted view of life and living.  It’s the same problem that turned relationship with Love Himself into ritual and religion.  The one that made shoulds and should-nots out of covenant-living with the very Creator of Life.

I have found that when I really focus on the true task at hand as lover of God Himself, it’s more about who I am than it is about what I do.  More about who He is making me than what I am doing or not doing for Him.  The same truth applies in reading my Bible, in mothering my children, serving my husband, sweeping my floor.  And it involves denying myself and my own plan.  It involves being who He has created me to be — follower of Jesus, wife, mother, keeper of my house.

So last night I gave up the comfort of getting things done.  And I joined their lung-burning, oxygen-sucking game of freeze-tag.  It was about being the mom who shows them, by the way I live, who Jesus really is.  By loving them for real.  And enjoying them for real.

And I think I got more done last night than I did all last week.