Saturday, August 30, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Faithful
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.
David Brooks wrote about curiosity and how it changes mediocrity to excellence in my life.
Like any passion, curiosity has to be transformed from a raw instinct to a methodical skill. The effectively curious people have cognitive enthusiasm (they like to explore mysteries and think about new things), cognitive confidence (they are brave enough to tackle hard problems) and cognitive complexity (they don’t settle for simple stereotypes).
Wanting flows from a sense of discrepancy. Based on the work of various psychologists, we could say that there are at least four basic psychological needs: for autonomy, belonging, competence and meaning. Of those, the drive for competence doesn’t get enough press. No matter how trivial an activity might be, most people seem to feel an innate need to get better at it.
People ensconced in their craft are drawn by some positive attraction, not driven by a fear of failure. They perceive obstacles as challenges, not threats. On their good days, they’ve assigned themselves the right level of difficulty. Happiness is usually not getting what you want or living with ease; it is living, from one hour to the next, at a level of just manageable difficulty.
By the time you’ve reached craftsman status, you don’t just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work. You may want to be a rock star, but if you don’t love the arduous process of making music and touring, you won’t succeed. The craftsman has internalized knowledge of the field so she can work by intuition, using her repertoire of moves, relying on hunches, not rules. W.H. Auden captured it perfectly:
   You need not see what someone is doing
   to know if it is his vocation,
   you have only to watch his eyes:
   a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
   making a primary incision,
   a clerk completing a bill of lading,
   wear the same rapt expression,
   forgetting themselves in a function.
   How beautiful it is,
   that eye-on-the-object look.
When people have reached this stage, they are living a life of leisure. These days we think of “leisure” as the relaxation we do when we’re not at work. But that’s not how people historically defined leisure. To them, leisure is the state of mind we are in when we are doing what we intrinsically want to do. The word “school” comes from the word “schole,” which is Greek for leisure. School is supposed to be any place where people are engaged in the passionate search for knowledge.
I was once in a grocery store in central Pennsylvania when I noticed that every jar on every shelf was carefully aligned. Somebody had taken some extra effort for the pleasure of doing it right. I think about this all the time — how our lives are sweetened by everyday excellence: The person smoothly and cheerfully checking you out at the grocery store or checking you in at the hotel reception desk.
Paradoxically life goes more smoothly when you take on difficulties rather than try to avoid them. People are more tranquil when they are heading somewhere, when they have brought their lives to a point, going in one direction toward an important goal. Humans were made to go on quests, and amid quests more stress often leads to more satisfaction. – David Brooks, NYT, 3/27/25
And it doesn’t seem to matter what quest you are on, what craft you strive to perfect. Aligning every jar on every shelf matters most to the aligner, and the Maker of that aligner. Jesus gets at this democratic way of looking at success without measuring its importance to the world … of course the person given ten talents, or even five, receives his master’s praise. But more than that …
Master, you gave me two talents.
See, I have made two more.’
His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.
Since you were faithful in small matters,
I will give you great responsibilities.
Come, share your master’s joy.
These are the words for all those who received talents to develop except the man with just one talent.
And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.
I think this man would also have been praised, but he thought only about the result and the master who would judge the result, and consequently he was paralyzed with fear. He did not realize the nature of the gift God gave him – the “talent” that consisted of his curiosity, perseverance and struggle toward the goal he chose. Discovering the nature of “leisure” by using his talent mattered far more to God than any “success” in the eyes of the world, large or small.
This opportunity to be ourselves and follow our nature into our own wild and precious life? Thus God pours out his love and frees us altogether from fear.
Well done, good and faithful servant.
 (1 Thessalonians 4, Psalm 98, John 13, Matthew 25)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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