7. An Eclipse of Duties

All of us have been in the situation I want to talk about in one way or another. We feel the weight of all the things we have to do, when another to-do suddenly asserts itself—something that is often little but completely derails the whole big, important operation of your life.

This happens in a million ways. Let’s say you are hosting a big event tomorrow but the baby is up all night teething. Or you are in your midlife and have never felt more responsibility when you suddenly also need to help care for an aging parent. Or you are simply in a rush to get somewhere when a child wants to put their own coat on or buckle themselves up.

This is a completely normal part of life which we could call an eclipse of duties. You are organizing a fundraiser and it feels really big and important. And the much smaller duty that is nonetheless closer to you creeps in to block it out. You have to hand things off so you can stay at home with a vomiting child.

These situations are clearly as diverse as we are, but they happen with such wild regularity that I think we can call them a feature and not a bug. And yet they also provoke a lot of responses from us. “Why me? Why now? Why does this always happen? I have so much to do and now this little problem which is not feeling important is taking it all over!”

You might receive the eclipse with self-pity (“this always happens to me, why do I always have to suffer . . .”) or with anger (“I am so sick of this!”) or with discouragement (“I knew something was going to happen like it always does . . .”) or with envy (“other people don’t have to stop everything to deal with this kind of thing.”)

But anything other than a glad acceptance of the up close and clear duty needs to be mortified. We tend to have some kind of pride that grows up in our ideas of what we should be accomplishing. We each think we are a wildly effective person who should not have to be interrupted with the cares of potty training. Everything we mean to be doing is big, big, big, and everything that is always keeping us from accomplishing it all in a glorious way is always little, little, little, and slow, slow, slow.

The heart of the problem is that the little and slow things feel like worthless things to us. We think they are so little we should not have to insert ourselves into them.

Well, I’m here to remind you that we are Christians. We serve a God who gave His Son, the second person of the Trinity, to us as an infant. Christ entered into the problems of a helpless infant. However big you think you and your tasks are, there is no comparison at all to the actual bigness of Christ.

And while the Lord was among us, getting ready to do the biggest thing ever done on earth, He was constantly being “interrupted” by everyone being hungry, by the disciples arguing, by someone running up and begging Him to come fix something. In Matthew nineteen, the Lord is being tested by the Pharisees who are trying to catch Him in the middle of a public intellectual battle. During all this, He is teaching the multitudes and healing people. And when the disciples wanted to shoo away the children who were inserted into this moment for a blessing, Jesus rebuked the disciples:

But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence. Matt. 19:14

The Lord’s earthly ministry as an archetype tells us that being interrupted, caring for the situation that has inserted itself right in front of you, and entering into the problem to heal it are the ways of the Christian. It’s not just sacrifice in some generic way. It is humility about the kind of sacrifice the problem requires. God Himself, in the person of His Son, entered into the smallest things in human existence. The Son, the Word, the One who was present at the creation of all things, who was the spoken Word that laid the earth’s foundations and slung the stars into the sky—the God who is worthy of all praise—that God. That is Who is entering into your smallest troubles. That is Who is providing grace to you and interceding for you at the right hand of the Father now. We do not serve a God who holds Himself aloof from things that seem smaller or insignificant compared to Him. Let us imitate Him in that, being full of joy at every opportunity to become more like Him. Suffer your little interruptions to come to you, and send them away with the blessing of our Lord.

Heavenly Father, I ask that this week, You would give us all opportunities to see in a deeper way the beauty of what You have done for us. Make us more like You, gladly reaching down and humbling ourselves that we might more accurately reflect Your kindness to us. In Jesus’s name, amen.

Rachel Jankovic