This morning my husband reminded me, “Don’t pee on your eye drops!”
My husband is rarely sarcastic, and though he has a wonderful sense of humor, he does not use odd imagery to get points across. So you do not need to scratch your chin, put on your deciphering hat and try to wonder about the deeper meaning of his reminder. He was quite literally encouraging me not to pee on my eye drops.
A little backstory.
I often have trouble prioritizing. I have a mental checklist that looks like one of those scrolls the town crier would roll out, and it rolls out all the way down to the ground, and then some. I picture the list and get it in my head that if I hustle, I can get those items crossed off the list and then maybe . . . what? Have time for some sort of leisure activity? (I am not quite sure, but if one day somehow I get the whole list crossed off, I will let you know what actually happens next.) For now what happens instead, though, is I end up feeling rushed, and somehow—even though I work very hard and do get a lot of things done in a day—the list grows instead of shrinks, which I realize defies logic.
Exasperating.
One morning I woke up and immediately marched lockstep in with my modus operandi, which is Readysetgo! I danced around in the kitchen a while, wiping down counters, putting away clean dishes, sudsing up dirty dishes, until I finally danced into the bathroom, because even though it slows down productivity, even very busy people have to stop to go to the bathroom at some point. But instead of simply stopping and going to the bathroom, like a normal person, I decided to multi-task. I grabbed my tiny bottle of allergy eye drops from the bathroom closet. Then I sat down while simultaneously twisting the cap off the dropper bottle, and, yes, I do not have to go into detail for you to figure out what happened next.
Sigh. (Well, maybe I didn’t just sigh. Maybe it was more like Marv’s response to getting outwitted by an eight-year old and getting his skull burned by Kevin McCallister in the holiday classic Home Alone.)
So why have my husband and I decided it is helpful to gently remind each other, “Don’t pee on your eye drops!”?
Because we all need reminders to remember to consider what it looks like to live life at a healthy pace. Everything in our culture tells us to rush, to hustle, to work, work, work. Our culture tries to trick us into thinking our worth is tied up with our productivity. But our Creator God reminds us to not succumb to the world, the culture, but instead to consider God’s pace. To consider the rhythm put into place millennia before smart watches and calendar apps and SignUp Geniuses. To consider how we might live our lives in a rhythm that is lockstep with the God who knows us and loves us, a God who is, who was, and who will be, regardless of what we accomplish or not. We are encouraged to take our burdens and our weariness right into the arms of our Creator and to receive the rest offered there.
Sigh. (This time it is a real sigh, exhaling the world’s perceived expectations.)
What does it look like to set awareness around the rhythms and cycles of the world?
What does it look like to try to move about the world in step with that Godly rhythm?
What are our priorities, and how will we protect them?
My encouragement, besides taking care not to pee on your eye drops, is to consider what it means to live life at a healthy pace, and to rest in the truth that regardless of what you do or do not do, you are enough.
