The Day’s Own Troubles
It’s my first full week of the spiritual
journey of 2008, and our checkbooks are balanced to the penny, we’re eating
better than we did when I was earning an income, and I’m thinking of
refinancing our home.
When I first started freelancing and
wasn’t contributing “my share” to the bills, I tried to keep the groceries in
order, as a gesture of gratitude to my girlfriend, for not insisting that I get
a “real job.” I got a little obsessive
about the checkbook, maybe in some effort to quantify just how grateful I
should be. And we refinanced our
mortgage almost annually.
Now that I’m not sure I’ll be
contributing at all, I find these old habits creeping back. I don’t mind the gratitude and hospitality
that comes into our kitchen with the groceries.
As my freelancing took off these last few years, our sense of home was
sorely challenged. This loss helped make
it easier to decide to try something a little different.
Or a lot
different. On the books, it doesn’t work for us to live on just one
income. But in our kitchen, living room,
(and bedroom!) things are pretty wonderful right now.
And still, the urge to rekindle my
relationship with our mortgage broker has me a tiny bit concerned. I keep remembering that passage out of Matthew’s
gospel (this is a spiritual journey, remember?), about serving God or serving
mammon.
“No one can serve two masters,” says
Jesus in the gospel. “For either he will
hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise
the other. You cannot serve God and
mammon.”
(For those of us who’ve gotten rusty in
our Semitic languages, “mammon” is a word for money or riches.)
What’s most interesting to me about the
passage is that it’s connected to the lilies of the field bit—urging the
apostles not to worry about what they’ll have to eat or drink or wear. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.”
And this is connected to the passage I
try to remember as a counterweight to my strongest personality traits: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for
tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let
the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”
When I focus down to just this day, the
troubles disappear…I’ve got a lunch date with a friend, and I’ve promised to
help my mom get hooked up on DSL. If
there’s time, I’m going to tinker with the threshold of our kitchen door. And then I meet my darling for dinner out
with friends.
When I think about just this single day,
the troubles disappear. And mortgage
brokering begins to feel like something…anxious, something that’s not quite
trusting, a little short on faith.
I can’t say that I understand. I’m not sure all these meals with friends
quite count as “seek[ing] first his kingdom.” But Jesus did spend a lot of time around a
table, and remembering just this single day kindles a warmth of gratitude that
halts the chilly breeze I feel some mornings, as I wake and move again away
from work, and wonder just what it is I’m doing.
(For those who are interested, the passages
are from Matthew 7: 24-34. New
© 2008
Melissa Capers