Several years ago, I traveled to El Salvador with a group of writers from the United States. We were invited to witness the impact of an international charity and to write about how people willing to send $30 a month to a child or elderly person could, in fact, change lives.
Years before, my husband and I had started sending money to a young man in India, and Lawrence felt like a very-far-off member of our family. We exchanged letters with him, and our boys prayed for him every day.
My time in El Salvador was amazing. Each day we took a different excursion, met with families who were helped by this small but generous monthly donation. One day, we went into the jungle and saw homes made of corrugated metal with roofs of enormous banana leaves. Another day we went to a mountain top neighborhood and spent the afternoon in a front room made of cinderblocks. This home had no running water and used a refrigerator turned on its side to collect rain.
The most impressive day was our next to last, where we drove up high into the Sierra Madre to a farming neighborhood. One family caught fish in a small man-made pond and used their goat for milk and cheese. They had banana trees and avocado trees and chickens running around the yard. On the way home from that visit, the writers and other volunteers climbed into the back of a truck to head down the mountain. We had to all lean together (first to the left, then to the right) to make it safely down the washed out dirt roads. Off in the distance was a volcano.
It was magic.
A few days later, I was back home with my family, my husband and our six children. I was standing in front of the washing machine still dreaming about my adventures the week before. It was a wonderful time, using my writing skills and my desire to help this organization spread this important message. It was a mission.
Back home, I was hunched over, gathering up crusty basketball socks and turning them right-side out.
“This,” I told God, “is not the best use of my gifts.”
In that flash of a moment, I was resenting the task I was doing. Who wants to do laundry when you can travel internationally? Or, as the saying goes, “Everybody wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do that dishes.”
Instead of being grateful for the opportunity I had been given (traveling and writing!), I was focused on how superior it was to the next opportunity I had been given (laundry and caring for my family).
It’s a strange thing, but in that moment, as I told God he was wrong about how he was using my time, I somehow felt him smile at me. It was crazy! I felt seen by God, but also I knew I needed an attitude adjustment.
After that laundry room revelation — the one where I knew my outlook was off but not quite sure where to go with this — I started really considering the task at hand. The Task at Hand. It was around this time (isn’t God so good to us when He unrolls truth!), that a friend shared with me a beautiful reflection called “The Duty of the Moment.”
In it, Catherine Doherty writes about how the thing we are doing, whatever it is, should be recognized as the thing God is asking us to do. If we see our current task not as a random chore but as something set before us by God, then we can undertake all of it — the glorious travel and the less glorious laundry — as the thing God is asking us to do.
“The duty of the moment,” writes Doherty, “is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don’t just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and the child. Do you do it that way? You can see Christ in that child.”
Doherty goes on to say that recognizing our duty of the moment brings Jesus into the center of everything we do; it brings Jesus into our midst.
“Your doing the duty of the moment, your living the nitty gritty, daily routine of ordinary life, can uncover the face of Christ in the marketplace. Christ can come into the place where you work or play or eat. He will come into your home or into a restaurant. He will come into a school or a company cafeteria or a subway or wherever.”
What a life-changing concept! No longer did I need to be a victim to the task at hand. I was doing the thing God was asking me to do, the Duty of the Moment.
I recently read a quote from a Benedictan monk that comes at this truth from a different angle.
“The reason that you are exhausted is that much of what you are doing you have no affection for. You’re doing it because you have an abstract idea that this is what you should be doing. You are exhausted because your energies lay elsewhere. You have been ripening yourself, and you are ready to harvest yourself, and if you don’t you will rot on the vine.”
Maybe the answer, in certain seasons, is not to begrudge the thing we are doing but to recognize it as a mission. Changing diapers, washing floors, running carpools, taking out the trash — these are the stuff of life! Seeing it as the thing God is asking me to do gives me the affection I need to embrace the task with joy. It is my mission, this duty of this moment.
Rachel Balducci is a faith columnist for the Augusta Press and a journalism professor at Augusta University. Reach her at rbalducci@augusta.edu
