I am trying to work my way through each week's lectionary texts.
 

 ²⁷Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.

I have been desperate to get a job lately.  As I have said over and over and over again.... I want to feel like an ADULT.  When did I get to this point? --- This point where my sense of maturity is so tightly tied to employment?

I always tell my two older children that "being an adult" means taking care of others.  I certainly do that!  Yet, whatever my theoretical understanding of human maturity,  I desperately want to get my pay--tangible evidence that I have worth, that people need me, and that at a practical level, I am valued.

Indeed--just lately-- more than ever before in my life-- I have been really craving stuff.  Nice stuff.  Coaches, and beds, and cars, and canoes, and new running shorts, and little bungalows.  Friends are getting these things and I have been wanting them.  Even more troubling is that I feel like they are deserved--that Doug and I are people with the kind of gifts that deserve to be rewarded in this way--  That, moreover, we must be failing or doing something really perverse if we are not obtaining these things.  It is hard to accept instead of these things a promissory note from God--what tender? " This bearer is entitled one free ticket to heaven."   Right now it just feel like an entitlement to absolutely banal, white, Western, first- world suffering.  Suffering people thinking that you are a slacker, or lazy, or just not too talented, or not very likeable.....  There is much worse suffering, but this is where I am right now.  I am willing to give up things, but I am not really sure if it is doing anyone any good. Is the world better because Doug and I aren't lawyers.  Moreover, I am not understanding why I should give these things up when other wonderful and faithful people aren't. . . .  So-in-so, they are great... they are great Christians AND they get stuff.  Good stuff.  I want stuff.  Or, that is more or less how it works....

If this eternal pay is more than just a free ticket to heaven--you can't win that anyway--then, what is it?  Shouldn't I just be bursting with joy?  Look at all the diversity at my dinner table? Shouldn't I be learning amazing lesson from living with so many people, from so many walks of life?  Isn't it all suppose to be a little piece of heaven?  Aren't I suppose to be getting a foretaste of the eternal pay, of a future great, reward.....?

What's going wrong?