What do YOU do all day?

Don't you just HATE that question of "what did you do all day?" Maybe I am alone, but I have always hated that question....Sometimes night time will creep up on me and before I know it, it is 10:00 PM, which is supposed to be my bedtime (though I'll most likely push it until 11 or 11:30). By the time "bedtime" rolls around though, I am seriously in shock when I look at the clock and see what time it is. Is it really that late? WHAT have I been doing all day? What do I have to show for myself? I am a "list of do's" type person, so before I will allow myself to go to bed at night, I have to justify to myself that I have done everything I could do to keep the house in order, have all things neat and taken care of, etc. This list is rarely ever accomplished, so of course I go to bed many times feeling guilty, lazy, or unsuccessful at my day no matter what I have done that day. There is still always something else left to do - another pile of laundry, another pile of papers to file, another pile of dishes to clean, another pile of mail to go through...there is always something. Sometimes when I focus too much on all the somethings, I can start to panic and feel like I'm going to drown in my own home. How will I ever get organized? How long can I keep shoving things into piles and shuffling those piles around? How in the world does a family as tiny as ours produce so much laundry?

The other day, I was studying the story of Noah (Genesis 6 and 7) and God has just kept this story with me throughout the whole week. He has just really impressed me with the importance of Noah's faithfulness and his patient trust in God to diligently do what God called him to do, no matter how tedious or pointless it seemed at the time. Have you ever really thought about how Noah must have felt, what temptations must have flitted through his head while building the ark, just hammering away day in and day out with not a rain cloud in sight while everyone around him sat on their tails and made fun of him? Regardless of whatever might have come into his head, though, he resisted quitting and instead kept hammering and working away at what the Lord had called him to do.

There is no real agreement on how long it took Noah to build the ark. Some say 120 years but others say 100 years, 75 years, or 50 years. Overall, the general consensus of most scholars is that it took the man a LONG time - at least 40-50 years. This would be years of just hammering one board and then the next, probably often by himself. You can only hammer one board at a time, you know. Perhaps his 3 sons may have helped him some, but we are not told if they in fact did help or not. We do know that no one else in the community was helping, because they all thought Noah was absolutely crazy. And, as there was really no way for Noah to speed up the whole ark building process, I wonder if he ever went to bed at night frustrated with his day, obsessing about how many boards he had nailed in, how much work he had left to do before the floods came. Or did he go to bed in peace, knowing that he had done all he could do that day and that the work would be finished in God's timing. Did he go to sleep knowing that even though the ark wasn't finished yet on day one, year one, year ten, etc....he could sleep in peace knowing he had been obedient to God by hammering one board in at a time.

Elisabeth Elliot says very simply, "When you don't know what to do next, just do the next thing." That is exactly what Noah did. He could not have known what the rain would be like; they had never seen anything like what God was going to do with the flood. He could not have known how the animals would come or when or where; I seriously doubt that all of those animals were lined up just watching him build the ark for 40 plus years....But he plugged away at doing "the next thing," even though he couldn't see the how or the why, simply because God had promised him that the floods would come and that the animals would come and that God would take care of the rest. He just kept doing what God called him to do, trusting God for the end result.

Right now, I am called by God to be a mom. Unfortunately, I am a single mom and I work so this does limit me in some ways BUT I am still first a mom and, with God's grace and His Spirit in me, I am able to fulfill whatever he wants me to accomplish. Right now my number one job that I feel God has called ME to do is to build the foundation on an ark for each of my children - so that one day, when they get ready to leave my home, they have a firm foundation to sail away on. I am adding one board at a time onto that ark. As they get older, I am teaching and will teach them how to add their own boards and nail them in. And hopefully, in however many years it takes to build their arks, they will be ready when the floods come.

To be perfectly honest, I think it is tedious as HECK building these arks. I am sick of one board at a time, one nail at a time, hammering away and not seeing the end-product. It would be so much easier to just order them an ark out of a catalog - why do I have to take time to build this ark with them myself?? They are so little, so young, that I am tempted to watch movies and read brainless novels instead of hammer boards and nails; I don't see any rainclouds on the horizon yet, so why should I waste my time? I also don't see any elephants or zebras lining up outside my house yet so can't I just do what I want to do instead of be the mom God called me to be?

But....If I lay down my hammer and my nails, then I am just as guilty as Noah's neighbors who yelled insults at him, ultimately mocking him for following the Lord. I KNOW in my heart that God has called me to invest in my children, to sow seeds in their lives, to teach them, to train them, to build them up. And if Noah could build a 450 foot ark by himself before the days of mass production, lumber mills, hardware stores, etc., then I can build my ark today too. The God who empowered Noah is my Lord too. He is the God of Noah, of Abraham, of Joseph, of Ruth, Esther - and He is the God who lives in me. So my arms are tired and I just want to go to bed, but I will pick up my hammer when He tells me to and I will hammer in .... one... more... board... and then another......and then another......and then another.... no matter how tedious it is. I will keep doing all of the little things that seem so pointless to me, but which are ALL part of that foundation that is necessary - one board at a time and one nail at a time - trusting in His call to just do the next thing and believing that in all of this, He will be glorified.

Deut 11:18-21 "Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth."