The "Real Work"

One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Henri Nouwen's book Reaching Out:

While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, "You know . . . my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.

In 2008, after being laid off from my hospice chaplain job, I had the opportunity to spend a summer doing nothing but finishing up my manuscript for Introverts in the Church. It was a glorious summer. Not only did I have the opportunity to recover emotionally and spiritually from a very demanding ministry, but I was able to live "the writing life." For the first time in my professional life I felt completely at home, like I had found what I was put on this earth to do.

Ever since then I have tried to work the rhythms of my life to revolve around writing. The problem, as everyone warned me but I refused to believe, is that writers just don't make any money. So I took a late-night chaplaincy position with my old hospice, which has brutal hours but enables me to write during the day. I'm trying to book more speaking gigs, which I enjoy but take up a lot of time and energy. I accept other writing assignments that pay well, and I participate in many other professional and educational activities. And I write blog posts, though not as often as I'm "supposed" to.

What I find myself struggling with is defining my book writing as my "real work" and everything else as interruption. I get frustrated when I spend a day in meetings, responding to emails, writing a blog post, even doing a radio interview but don't do any of the real work. Or sometimes I will have a hard night of hospice ministry and will just have no motivation when I wake up (usually around 11AM) to do any writing. I can even spend a whole day doing necessary things yet feel "unproductive" if I don't write at least 1000 words in my book project.

I'm not sure where I get this definition of what comprises real work and what counts as unreal work. Why is it that good, important work can often feel like mere distractions to me? I wonder why I have developed such a hierarchy of work value. Perhaps it's because I'm most passionate about book writing, but I have a suspicion that I have a persistent, internal divide between sacred and secular. The message of the Reformers, that we must not restrict "holy ground" to particular places and activities, has not yet seeped all the way into my heart. I think I have grasped the fact that "ministry" is not to be divided from "normal work" but I have not yet accepted that "creative work" is not to be divided from normal work.

No matter what our sense of call, I think our true life-call is to experience God in all our "interruptions" and in all the ordinariness of daily life, from the profound to the profane. The creativity of God is not that he is injecting extra beauty into the most sublime aspects of human life. The creativity of God is such that he is able to shape all the necessary and boringly human aspects of this existence into works of beauty.