Worth it After All

This week, we had one of those Pacific Northwest weather events we call “snow.” We call it snow, because that’s easier than saying “tiny ice pellets being blown around like a blizzard, layered with freezing rain and a couple snowflakes, resulting in a solid sheet of ice.” In my area, we hardly ever get real, honest snow, but we do get ice, and that amounts to the same thing: a snow day.

I think it must be a particular sign of adulthood that a snow day on a Saturday seems like just as much of a treat as a snow day during the week. And when I woke up to the bright glare of daylight on icy snow, I knew exactly how to use my day.

Years ago, when we first moved to our house, I was teaching piano. My brother framed in part of the downstairs garage to be my piano studio, and fitted it out with soundproofed walls. After a few years, I was teaching school, and had no piano students at the house. The room shifted and became a craft room. Then both grandmas moved, and later passed away and there was an influx of stuff. When I finally got the boxes of heirlooms and memories sorted through and stored away, I began an eBay business, and the room was soon full of boxes again.

The eBay business withered away a couple years ago, and I just haven’t had time or energy to sort the room out.  So an ice-blizzard Saturday seemed like God’s gift to me—an extra day off in which to finally begin the great cleanout.

But all the stuff… remnants of business and hobbies that feel like another lifetime ago. All that work and time invested that now seems to have gone to waste. But I kept telling myself, it didn’t matter. The person I am now needs the room cleared out and usable.

I made more progress that day than I would have thought possible, and as I pulled my aching muscles and tired feet to my room that night, I read the proverb for the day and found this verse:

“In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury.” (Proverbs 14:23)

Thinking back on the years since we moved to this house, many hobbies, interests, and fledgling “careers” have come into my life and then faded away. At first, it all seemed like a waste of time and effort, but I can honestly say that in each season of life I learned important lessons, grew in significant ways, or gained valuable experience—all of which have become ingredients of who I am today. There was profit in that labor.

With a Biblical perspective and the understanding that God really does sometimes call us to different things in different seasons, I can continue to sort and purge, clean and reorganize with peace and joy, instead of guilt or indecision. There was profit in those years of labor, as there is in those to come. It wasn’t all a waste.

As you and I walk with God through each season of life, we can rest in the truth that He has a specific purpose for every detail of our lives. Though our efforts may at times seem fruitless or meaningless, we can trust that in all labor there is profit. Anything God calls us to has value, and someday we will find each season to be worth it, after all.

“Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established.” Proverbs 16:3