Next week I’m speaking at our church’s MOMSnext group on the topic of “fierce flourishing.” I feel unqualified. Each day I face a mountain of uncompleted items on my to-do list. It often grows and rarely shrinks. My reality isn’t what I think of when I think of flourishing. However, in preparing to speak I’ve remembered some words of Jesus and discovered a simple practice with the power to transform my stress over unfinished to-do items.
John 17:4 records that on his last night with his disciples Jesus said that he had finished his work. If you’ll let me get all language geeky for a moment, the Greek word translated as “finished” means fulfilled or completed. It’s the word you use when you’re done with the work you set out to do. Yet, Jesus left so much undone. Imagine how many people Jesus didn’t heal or how many didn’t hear his words of forgiveness. With so much undone, how could Jesus say he had finished his work?
In the pamphlet Tyranny of the Urgent, Charles Hummel suggests that Jesus could say he had finished, because he never intended to do everything. Unlike many of us he didn’t expect himself to do more than was humanly possible. He had realistic expectations about what he could do, knew what God wanted him to do, and did it without worrying about what went undone.
A few weeks ago I stumbled into a simple practice that’s helping me let Jesus transform my to-do list stress into something that feels a bit closer to flourishing. I had so many items on my electronic to-do list that I made a paper to-do list with just the highest priority tasks. As I completed each task, I drew a line through it, but unlike my digital to-do list, these completed tasks remained visible. When I got to the end of the week, my uncompleted tasks sat among a collection of completed ones. My to-do list now had a companion “to-done” list bearing witness to my accomplishments.
I felt pretty good about all I had done, and imagine how good I would have felt if I had prayed for God’s guidance about what to put on my to-do list in the first place! Always room to grow
See you Sunday!
Rich
Rich Rindfuss
Access Pastor
First United Methodist Church Richardson