We get carried away by what we do
We are in constant danger of attaching ourselves to what we do.
Our danger is this: In hooking ourselves to our efforts, we carry ourselves up and off. But inevitably what we do breaks down and disappears, and then we’re left falling. The farther you’ve carried yourself, the longer your fall, and there’s always a fall. You can’t do anything forever.
You’re a student and then you graduate. You’re a mother and then your children grow up. You’re in charge and then you get old. Each role you play is a number slapped on your chest for a sprinting race in some direction, but there is always a finish.
That’s doing. We’re in frantic flux and we sometimes get lost.
Who we are though is something deeper. It’s not a sprint but more rooted motion, like stacking stones one on the last or digging a hole deeper until well-water bubbles up. It happens in long arcs like growing trees.
That’s being. We’re always becoming more of what we are.
I think the danger of getting carried away with doing is especially great when what we do is something other people admire.
One of my friends here in Denver is a pastor, and he told me that his identity has become tangled with his office so it’s hard to tease out what’s what. People think of him as a pastor, and in our crowd this is a very good thing, so he puts it on and polishes it and wears it like a medal that’s part of him.
If he ever stops performing the role of pastor, he’ll have to put the medal away. Then what will people think of him? Then how will he know who he is? It will be a long fall.
Someday I have a fall coming, too. I’ve run my own business for a year. People’s ears perk up when I tell them. If I do something else or the business fails, will I be less interesting? Will I be less myself?
Of course, there’s no straight line between what we do and who we are, not really. The words are just windows to look through. Our doing becomes our being; what we do is a small stone stacked to make who we are. So each day I work on my business and my friend works at church, I guess we dig our wells a little deeper and also hitch ourselves a little higher up and farther off.
Movement is unavoidable, even good. But we need a mooring line to remember ourselves, and we have to be careful not to hook the line to the wrong thing or we’ll end up tumbling through space like an astronaut into emptiness.
Let me hook into God who is the fullness of being. Let me do what gives me life. And let those two be the same.