The Sweetness of Doing Nothing
Lauren Lee is on the blog today and we are so excited for our new friend to share what has been on her heart during this season we are going through! We encourage you to read her story and our hope is that you feel challenged and encouraged by what Lauren has to say!
Read below, comment, and join the conversation! XO, the Boldly Seeking Team
A friend recently introduced me to her favorite movie, Eat, Pray, Love. It’s not a very recent movie, but one she had completely memorized, and she felt it was her moral obligation to share with me. In the film, Julia Roberts’ character discovers her true meaning in a warm, lighthearted way that only Julia Roberts can, but it wasn’t the storyline that had me pondering for days. It was one simple phrase.
There’s a scene in the movie where Julia’s character is talking with some Italian locals about the guilt she feels for having spent three weeks in Italy only to have learned a few words and eat everything she could get her hands on. The locals laugh and say, “You only feel guilty because you are American.” They proceed to say that doing nothing is part of the Italian way of life; so much so that they even have a catch phrase for it: “Dolce far niente”... “The sweetness of doing nothing.
Perhaps many took that line as a self-help tip on allowing oneself to relax and eat some pasta, but for me, it struck a much deeper, more embedded place in my soul. I grew up in the church. Literally. My grandfather was the pastor of our small congregation, my grandmother played the piano, my father led the adult discipleship ministry, my mother was in the choir….you get the idea. The concept of salvation was one explained to me at an extremely early age, and while the words “grace by faith” were used implicitly, the way I saw many adults in my life strive for God’s approval and love made salvation seem a little less gracious and a lot more tiring. However, I couldn’t help but follow suit. I grew from a middle-schooler obsessed with memorizing more verses than anyone else in Sunday School to a high-schooler laser focused on reading the Bible cover to cover, as many times as I could, before I graduated. Then from a college student struggling to reconcile the loving Jesus I saw with the rules I tried so hard to keep, to a young worship pastor working 65 hours a week--neglecting friends and family--because “that’s what ministry required of me.” I was growing weary. The Good News was feeling less appealing by the second, and I didn’t get how a free gift could cost me so much. It wasn’t until my mind and body gave up on me, and all my striving still left me broken, that I started to reevaluate the way I looked at my walk with Jesus. What if I really, truly, deeply believed that my right standing with God was FREE? (Romans 5:15-18)
People often get nervous when you start to focus on grace. Perhaps it sounds too good to be true. Perhaps it sounds like an excuse to continue living however you want to. Perhaps it sounds lazy. And we aren’t the first generation of human beings who can’t quite grasp that right standing with God isn’t something to be earned by our own work. Time and time again in Scripture, we see examples of people gritting their teeth as they work to the bone just to be forgiven, trampling over one another for the seat closest to God. Those same people, when reaching their version of “right standing,” would often look down on those who couldn’t quite get it right and say, “Why don’t you just work a little harder at being holy?”
Time and time again, we see Jesus turn their worldview completely on its head.
My favorite example of this is a well known passage found in Luke 9. The people following Jesus the closest begin to argue over which of them is the greatest. I can imagine Jesus being disheartened by this conversation, and wondering how the people who knew Him best didn’t seem to get Him at all. He leans over, picks up a small child and says, “He who is the least among you all is the one who is great.” In current culture, it’s easy to think He is talking about a child’s innocence, but really He is speaking of a child’s helplessness and utter dependence on their caretakers. In this passage, I believe He is trying to say that whoever trusts the most in His love and forgiveness, and not in their own ability, has the greatest clarity on who He is.
Once we understand that His gift comes from love and not for love, we can begin to live our lives from love and not for love. We might end up reading our Bibles, praying more, attending studies, and helping the less fortunate, but it won’t be to earn something. It will come from the sweetness of the knowledge that we are loved and approved, even in doing nothing. We can finally stop pretending we are something great only in holiness and accept that we are beloved even in our wretchedness. Brennan Manning says in his book, Abba’s Child, “While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.” My striving and trying don’t make me more loveable, and my failures and flaws don't make me less so. I can rest, lean back in my Father’s love, and breathe easy. This isn’t to say that following God won’t require sacrifices, or that life is without pain and hard work. But it’s never about earning. In the love and gift of Christ, I can finally rest in the sweetness of doing nothing. Dolce far niente.
