Martha and Mary and Marvin

Perhaps you have heard the story from the Bible about Mary and Martha.  It goes like this: Jesus and his disciples were out traveling.  They came to a village and Martha, a woman who lived in the village, opened her home to the disciples for them to rest and have some food.  Martha busied herself with all the preparations that came with hosting Jesus and a dozen of his closest followers. With these unexpected guests, she was running around trying to get the house cleaned and straightened up and cook a decent meal for her guests.  Meanwhile Mary, Martha’s sister, simply sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to what Jesus had to say.  Martha got super upset with Mary and then asked Jesus to tell Mary to stop sitting around and help!

Jesus calmly responds, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42).

I have always found that I am more of a Martha.  I tend to focus more on tasks and getting things done.  I would much rather be in the kitchen cooking and cleaning than in the living room entertaining guests.  On the surface level, there’s nothing really wrong with this, but not remembering the deeper message of this story can get us in big trouble.

This week I got a “Mary/Martha perspective check”.

It was a long week of desperately trying to get done everything that needed to get done at work.  I’m usually able to put my daily “to-do” reminder lists on post-it notes, but this week a full size legal pad was necessary for my “to-do” list.  Every day, I was acutely aware of how I was just barely keeping my head above water. 

Friday came around and the list was getting shorter, but was still too lengthy for comfort.  I immersed myself in work on Friday with the sole goal of being able to cross things off the list and be able to head into the weekend without too much work hanging over my head.

Then a little after lunch my phone rang.  I picked up the phone and a friendly gentleman greeted me.  He didn’t say his name right away, so it took me a moment to figure out who it was.

But then I recognized his voice.  It was Marvin, one of the homeless men who stay at my church each Wednesday evening.  I have gotten to know Marvin and we usually chat a bit each Wednesday night about what we had been up to over the past week.   

Our phone conversation wasn’t more than a couple of minutes, but in those minutes Marvin gave me a perspective check without realizing he did so.  Marvin didn’t call for any reason in particular- he just called to say hello and wish me a blessed day.  But he said something that made me realize how much I of a “Martha” I was this last week.  He told me that he saw me on Wednesday evening, but it looked like I was “on a mission” and busy so he didn’t try to get my attention to say “hi”.

I had been too busy to stop for even one moment and say “hello” to Marvin. 

I felt ashamed and guilty that I had let all the little (and not so little) work tasks take over my thinking and doing and had become so completely consumed by these tasks that I couldn’t be bothered to do something that wasn’t on my to-do list.

I had been worried and even upset about trying to get all my work done, but in that moment Wednesday evening (and perhaps at other moments in this past week) I needed to be more like Mary.  I needed to recognize the one thing that was truly needed.  I should have taken the time to at least say “hello” to Marvin.  If Jesus had been sitting there instead of Marvin, I can’t say with confidence that I would have even noticed.  Ultimately, I failed to love God and serve God through loving and serving the least of these brothers and sisters of Jesus (Matthew 25:40).

Yes, there are tasks that need to be done.  I do need to do my work.  But the minute that doing things on my “to-do” list consumes me so much that I can’t even stop one second to say “hi” to a person who has shown me great kindness is the minute I need to find a better balance.  Figuring out how to regain a better balance and actually re-balancing is a whole other story, but at the very least I hope start to better recognize when I’m being too much of a Martha.

Who. Not what.

For most of my life I have known that God has a plan for my life.  This fact should be very reassuring and encouraging, but for many years, knowing that God has a plan for my life has filled me with anxiety and has left me in fear of not following God’s plan for my life.

I believed that God has one very specific and exact plan for the way I am supposed to live my life.  I imagined that God had laid out my life and I needed to essentially read God’s mind in order to figure out what to say, what to think, where to go, where to stay, and what to wear so that I would please God and live the life God wanted me to live.  I thought making one wrong choice, one mis-step, one incorrect action would forever alter my life in a way that would never allow me to get back on the “right” path that God had intended me to walk down.

And it was never the worry of making bad choices that gave me such anxiety.  I’ve never been one to consider recklessly breaking laws, repeatedly partying hard through the night and ditching class in the morning, or doing other such things that would detrimentally affect my life.  The decisions that filled me with anxiety were decisions between doing two or more good things.  Decisions like: should I join the Peace Corps or should I go to graduate school to study social justice?  Or should I apply to work at Non-profit Organization A or Christian Organization B? 

I often felt paralyzed and unable to make any decision because I was so afraid of making the wrong decision. 

To some extent I’ve wanted to hold on to the belief that God has one specific plan for my life: a second-by-second plan to living the life God intended for Melissa.  If I could just figure out a way to read God’s mind and know what that second by second plan is, life would be so easy…

But I’ve come to understand that God’s plan for my life is more about WHO God wants me to be and less about WHAT God wants me to do.  If I am the person God wants me to be then I will naturally do the things God wants me to do.

God wants me to be a person who loves and serves God and likewise loves and serves other people.  God wants me to be a person who seeks justice and leads other people to act in ways that bring about justice in this world.  And God wants me to be a person who has hope and spreads that hope that one day the Kingdom of God will be fully present on earth.

Perhaps it is the case that God has a detailed plan laid out for my life.  I’m not opposed to this idea, but I’ve found such freedom in relinquishing the idea that I need to figure out and follow some unknown to me second-by-second and step-by-step plan.

So for now my plan is to trust and be. I’m going to trust that God has a plan for my life and try to be the person I think God wants me to be.

Doing Spring Things in February

Last week I wrote about my love of snow and how glad I was to finally get some decent snow.  I’m still holding out for another couple of feet of snow this year, but this weekend I started getting ready for SPRING!

Yesterday I made a trip to the library to pick up a couple of tax forms and I came home with a nice stack of books on organic gardening/farming, microgreens, growing plants from seed, composting, and urban farming.  

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening reading the books and absorbing all the information and by the time bed time came around I was so excited about planting and growing vegetables that I was ready to go outside right then and start planting things.  Of course the seeds wouldn’t do so well this this weather, so I managed to have enough patience and I spent way too much time on Pinterest looking at gardening things and I decided to start some seeds inside this afternoon.

I went out through the cold rain to the shed to dig out my seed starting supplies and then proceeded to take over the kitchen and get dirt all over the counter and under my nails.

I’ve got a whole assortment of seeds, some that I saved from veggeis over the past couple of years and some left over from last year’s seed packets. 

I mixed up some organic seed starting mix with some water and some worm tea (the liquid that gathers in the bottom of the container our composting worms live in: see my post on our worm farms for more info on our sweet worms).  

This went into the seedling tray.  Then I put 2-3 seeds in each cell.  I planted tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, jalapeno peppers, cucumber, and cantaloupe (I planted the cucumber and cantaloupe mostly to check how well those seeds will germinate, usually cucumber and cantaloupe seeds are planted right in the ground).

The greenhouse top is on and they will sit in our kitchen windowsill and hopefully soon we’ll start to see some seedlings!

Snow

It seems that people either love snow or they hate snow.  I definitely fall into the former category.  I guess I can understand the reasons why some people hate snow.  For those of you who are haters, I need to apologize to you because I’ve been praying a lot lately for snow.  Sorry.

I just don’t understand what’s not to love about snow…

It’s peaceful.  I just love sitting and watching the snow fall quietly to the ground.  I love how it blows and drifts from the sky to the ground.

It’s beautiful.  I love how light snow sits on and piles up on tree branches.  I love how the wind makes ripples in the snow.

It transforms.  When the flowers die, the grass starts to turn browner, and the leaves fall off the trees in the fall, things can be drab and even ugly.  But snow transforms nature.  It brings brightness and light to what was dark.

I got to do a little cross country skiing with my sister and my dog this afternoon.  It was glorious.  

Buddy LOVES the snow!

He found a stick to play with and had SO much fun!