Nothing (Mar 18-25)

This week in snapshots:

Happy Saturday, dear humans!

I’ve been reminded of the importance of doing nothing. That might seem like an oxymoron, but I assure you that stopping all your doing is one of the best things you can do in our hyper-paced, consumer-driven, late-capitalist society… and every other society too, but just consider your own response to the idea of doing nothing.

Tell me about it? When do you “do nothing”? When can you do nothing? Do you ever want to do nothing? Have you ever decided to do nothing and had a reaction to stopping?

What do you actually do when you’re not doing anything?

One of the MANY reasons I’ve ditched Facebook+Instagram is because that’s what I was actually doing when I had nothing to do. I lost HOURS to their algorithm. (Tbh I can still lose hours on YouTube if I’m not careful, but I also learn a frickton lol). And it feels like a loss because even though I saw new memes, the “do nothing” time wasn’t educating, edifying, or empowering my “do something” time. 

Now the thing I practice doing when I do nothing is prayer. Not just the “Our Father” prayer, but noticing prayer, or petitioning prayer, or listening prayer, or meditation… which is where a lot of these letters have been coming from!

Every moment of these workdays have been packed with doing. We had worked 40 hours by Wednesday at dinner time… We start when we get to the jobsite and go-go-go until we get into the car for our long commute back to the hotel.

So the commute - where I can’t do anything and must do some nothing - has been a godsend. I’m bad at doing nothing.

In fact, I wrote this as my embrace of the nothing 😂

It’s never really “nothing,” is it? You have your sweet little somethings that you do with your nothing, just like I’m typing, just like I’m practicing praying. You’ve hopefully already typed up a response with what you actually do when you do nothing.

And my follow-up question is quite simply: does your nothing make you feel more alive, or less? Does it increase or decrease your overall joy? Does it make you feel more connected to God, to living, to loving… or do you feel disconnected?

On the job when we stop working on Saturday nights, we have all of Sunday to rest. And these two things are the first half of sabbath: to stop our labors and to rest from them. But that’s usually where we end with our doing nothing… we cease striving and do a different kind of something. But God’s Fourth Commandment invites us to a specific kind of different something: to delight! which always leads to worship.

Delight makes you feel more alive, increases your joy, and connects you to God, his love for life - and especially your life! And so I find myself, when I’m overtired and not even able to remember the Our Father, simply stopping and delighting in nothing. And always I find myself catching sight of trees in bloom, children with their parents, or some other thing that captures me into thanks - makes me feel, even though I am drooping from sleep deprivation, more alive, and connects me, even though He had not answered any of my prayers for reprieve from the 15 hour days, to the living and loving God.

Why do you do nothing? To escape something? Or to engage a different kind of something that increases your quality of life?

Tell me about it,

—Beth