Doesn’t it feel great to lie down at night knowing you’ve done something that day worth doing?
On a recent Saturday, as the remodeling of our home neared its end, I installed four smoke alarms, set three commodes, put up the tub/shower hardware in two bathrooms, and replaced 15 light switches.
In my spare time that day I sold one old rent house and rented another.
Shortly after
Maybe this means more to me than to some folks because I have one of those jobs that never gets done. My friends love to kid me about my “two-hour-a-week position.” Truth is, however, that my “two hours” could easily expand into 60 or 70, and still I could find another family to encourage, another widow to visit, another sermon point to research, another marriage to mend.
Don’t take me wrong. I’m not complaining. I love what I do. I have the greatest job on earth. But it comes without a time clock. Without a firm job description. Without a way to know when it’s done.
That’s one reason I like the hard physical labor of plumbing and wiring and carpentering. I can walk away from such projects, with hands dirty, muscles aching, all the while savoring the deep satisfaction of a tangible task completed.
I suspect that life is a lot like that. What if we find ourselves about to run out of days, as one of my good friends did rather abruptly last week, and only then realize that we have frittered away our life on foolish pursuits that don’t really matter? This must be the ultimate remorse.
So Jesus warns those of us who will hear him, “We must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.”
Surely it will be easier to accept our life’s conclusion if at the end we can look back and tell ourselves, “This is what I accomplished in the days God gave me. This is the difference I made.” Then we could lie down that one last time, just as I lay down to sleep after that hard day’s labor, with a deep sense of contentment and peace.