Being, Not Doing – How Un-American

I awake from yet another nap, hazy-eyed and curious if my body is feeling any better. Sometimes my body feels so separate from “me” that I have to check on it as if it is its own entity. It won’t co-operate and doesn’t feel integrated with the “me” that is my soul.

I lie still and check my breathing, my headache or lack thereof, and I check to see how my a-fib is doing. I’m still here, so I think. I think about how I used to do so much. I think about how I used to think my significance and my hope for leaving even a small legacy of some sort was all in the doing. Doing a lot. Doing a lot all the time. Helping women. Traveling around the world, etc. Well, I need a deeper, more certain reason for my hope, my place where I feel loved and where I place my significance. As a follower of Jesus, I explore this in new ways. Since coming to Him, I’ve known, truly, He loves me with mercy and grace, but I need to believe it better, deeper.

These days, I’m “being.” I recently took a little downturn, went back on my oxygen, and began napping all the time. The fevers came along for the ride. And although I am writing this while propped up, I’d say I’m more being than doing. I could stop typing at any moment and lie back down again and totally just be. I ate a bowl of soup today for lunch, and I had to take a two hour nap after that effort.

I wanted to write because I’ve been thinking about my worth in just being. Hour after hour, lying in bed, I am being, not doing. As an American doer, that’s a hard pill to swallow. In the same way, I think in an American way; I have to do something to earn God’s love and care. However, the Bible makes me think counterintuitively, counter Americanly, and states that God loved me way before I loved Him, and His love is all a free gift or grace…But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, …Ephesians 2:4-9  There it is – not my own DOING. Sigh. Lean into it. Rest in it.

I’ll try to continue writing in the days ahead….I do have a new idea for a storying art project based on hope and being with our God. That would be “doing” which I am currently not doing. (Smile.) Tomorrow, I have a meeting with my new doctor in Seattle. I am looking forward to what she might suggest.