Lord God Of The Tedious

Zip. Zip. Whirr. Whirr. Flash. Flash. Zip. Zip. Whirr. Whirr. Flash. Flash. Zip. Zip. Whirr…

Friday, and the past couple of days, I spent scanning over 300 pages of those 17^th Century puritan diaries I’ve mentioned before.

One page at a time.

Zip. Zip. Whirr. Whirr. Flash — with an occasional BUZZ!

My scanner times each pass with calculated precision. so that it gives me no time to do anything between a Zip and a Whirr. I can’t light my pipe, nor run to the bathroom, nor think a thought before it’s time to press the next button or flip to the next page.

Rote. Monotonous. Tedious. Routine work.

Then each page must be checked because I’m working from an edition printed in 1933 with many footnotes in tiny agate font and the scanner’s optical character recognition feature insists that an R in the original text is really a B, or maybe a K.

Besides that, while the puritan diarists may have been godly men, they could spell worth diddle squat! Maybe that why I feel such an affinity for them.

The repetitive motions of scanning text hurts my back, neck and arms. My eyes blur. My back aches. My mind wanders.

Who cares whether this job is done right or not?

Who is likely to read this stuff?

Why am I doing this?

Don’t I have more urgent things to do?

Doesn’t God have any better use for my talents?

Maybe not.

Beauty says that at least this job keeps me off the streets.

She says that may well be the Divine purpose for the whole project.

During smoke breaks I got to thinking about how often in Scripture God calls people doing rote, routine things.

Moses was minding his own business tending sheep when that Burning Bush appeared. So was David when the call came to him. Gideon’s mind was set on getting the harvest thrashed when the angel appeared out of the blue Mathew had his nose stuck in his accounting books when Jesus called him. .Peter, James and John mended nets with no thought of God at all when Jesus said, “Follow me”.

Often I feel disappointed that God does not allow me to do great things; He keeps me saddled with the low, tedious, routine, mundane. His kingdom is not made up of great people only. He is also Lord of us insignificant ones.

I’ve often wondered about “The Will Of God” for my life, and when I do, the thought always comes to me, “Do the obvious”.

Do the routine duty right before your eyes.

If you can’t change the world, change the baby!

As Jeremiah the prophet said to Baruch, an ambitious young man who aspired to be a prophet, “Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not”.

God already has a replacement in mind to fill Billy Graham’s shoes. Understudies for Mother Teresa and Oprah are in the wings. Stephen King is already in place as God’s choice for a best selling writer.

According to an apocryphal writing (No. I do not place much stock at all in such things) Jesus once said, “When you hew the firewood, I am there. When you draw water from the well, I am with you. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them”.:

Brother Lawrence, a 17^th Century monk, said that we are to do little things just for the love of God, that God does not count the greatness of a task so much as the love with which we do it.

When I sat down to write this blog post, I yearned to write my opinions about the Iraq war and President Bush’s speech the other night. I’ve had a bug in my ass about this issue for weeks. Nobody I hear on tv or radio voices the same opinion I hold.

But who needs another unfounded opinion about the war?

That is not my place.

There will always be wars and rumors of wars — but the end is not yet.

At the moment I have no special duty to advise the president on how things should be handled internationally (Although I don’t think I could do much worse than the advisors he already has).

No. My duty this moment is to make sure that’s really a B or a K instead of an R.

Why?

Because Jesus is Lord — even of the tedious.