Forget the World

About a year ago, I started a blog on the World Wide Web. I soon discovered that the world is a pretty big place. Many an evening found me surfing from blog to blog, in a never-ending string of discovery. The floor went unswept. The dishes languished. Sometimes the kids even went unkissed.

No matter. I justified my activities with a simple excuse. This was part of my business. I’m a writer. And every writer needs a platform. All the better if it spans the world. So I kept typing away. Daily posts. Comments on blogs from Singapore to St. Louis. (Besides, I was secretly having a whole lot of fun and making real friends.)

Then one day, I did a project with my eldest daughter. We each created an artistic response to the Sermon on the Mount. I did a sketch that showed all the things I’d need to leave behind if I were going to climb the mountain to really come close to Jesus. My daughter, in flattering emulation, drew a similar kind of picture.

Except. Except that her pile of things to leave behind included this unassuming computer, with a steaming cup of tea beside it.

My daughter is only ten years old. She does not own a computer. She rarely drinks a cup of tea, unless she is social drinking with the family. I suspected the worst. My blogging had become more than simple business, even more than innocent fun and friendship. The truth stared back at me in paper and pencil, from my daughter’s own hand.

In a sense, she captured what’s been a recurring issue in my work life . . . the issue of limits. When to stop working and start remembering I have a family that needs my daily sacrifices—not necessarily the big sacrifices we’re sometimes called to make, like taking care of a family member fallen gravely ill. But, rather, the little sacrifices. One hour less at the keyboard. Weekends when I refuse to ruminate about work but instead go on a family hike. Taking a vacation instead of pushing through the entire year because “I just can’t leave work right now.”

The Bible speaks to me about limits in a very simple passage from the book of John. This may not be what John intended, but it’s a powerful way for me to think about sacrificing unending work possibilities for family time.

Here it is: “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). The world itself could not contain the books.

John realized that he could have kept at it. He could have written the earth’s longest series. Maybe The Never-Ending Chronicles of John. The world itself could not contain what John could write, if he just kept at it.

And so it goes. Sometimes it seems like the world itself could not contain the work I could do if I just kept at it. Blogging one more hour. Writing one more article. Speaking at one more function. The world is a pretty big place.

But this tiny passage from John urges me to forget the world. I’ve got smaller places to attend to . . . a home with a table for four, kids who need kissing, and even a little social drinking to engage in—please, make ours tea.

Read more from L. L. Barkat at her blog Seedlings in Stone.