Love it or Leave it

March 24, 2019

Doing what you love is not always peaches and cream. If you love it, you want to do your best at it, put your time into it, sacrifice lesser loves for it. All the competing loves that tug at your heart, making you wonder “What if I took this other road?” have to be forcibly relegated to a lower place on the priority list, where they really don’t want to be. We have only so much time and energy to invest in life; no one can accomplish everything needing to be done. 

I attended a seminar featuring one of the premier jazz bassists alive today. During a question and answer time, one of the students asked him about playing electric as well as upright bass. This man is an amazing musician, more accomplished than most of us can ever hope to be, but he told this student that he realized years before that he needed to choose between the two, that even though both instruments are basses, occupying the same place on the musical scale, each has technique peculiar to itself, and he couldn’t be excellent in both. He chose the upright, but to do so, he had to abandon any thought of mastering the electric at the level he wanted to play.

I don’t understand people who get bored. I have more things I’d like to do than I could manage in a hundred lifetimes. There isn’t enough time left in this life to even scratch the surface of all that interests me, which means I have to make some decisions. I’d love to travel; I’d love to go into business for myself; I’d love to become a good musician; I’d love to read all the books I have stored in boxes...the list goes on and on. Every Sunday evening, this heavy feeling of dread starts to worm its way into my heart; it takes quite a bit of energy for me to corral my thoughts (2 Corinthians 10:5-6) and come to terms with my choices. Because every Sunday morning when it comes time to preach, I discover all over again how much I love what I do. I love digging deep into the Scriptures, sorting through and arranging my thoughts into what I hope will be a coherent and easy to follow outline that is both interesting and compelling. I always feel unable and unworthy to do what I do, and pray God will do something with it to transform my people’s lives, strengthening and encouraging them to live out the Gospel on a daily basis. The fact is, I love what I am doing, and the other stuff is once more on the back burner. 

There are times I’d like God to let me off the hook, to take a break, to give my mind a rest, but that’s probably not best for me. So once more I make the choice, and tomorrow I’ll get back at it, grateful that somehow God seems to continue honoring these feeble efforts. It’s a new week!