“Your husband invited me to your place for dinner one of these days. I’m very thankful. But I’m sorry, I have to say no.”
“Why?”
I was utterly bewildered. Weren’t we friends? After all these years, from spit-fire curses to one-hour talks over packed dinner by the dirty steps of a train station to yearly performances at my birthday parties, weren’t we friends?
“You don’t understand,” Grandpa Zhou said, fingering his tattered box with a layer of coins and a two-dollar bill. “My life and your life are different.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t we friends? But you’ve had dinner with us before, right?”
“Yes. But those were special occasions. You don’t understand, if we have dinner, it’ll take an hour. Sometimes, in an hour, if I’m lucky, someone drops a ten-dollar bill into my box.”
I was shocked, yet not. Because it wasn’t the first time he had said something like that before.
You, too, might be shocked. After all, doesn’t it sound as if he valued money more than friendship?
“You don’t understand,” he repeated. “Your life and mine are different.”
But I thought, perhaps, we weren’t so different after all.
Over the past few months, working as a fully registered medical officer in the Eye department opened my eyes (excuse the pun) to a myriad of realities of life, which I should have known, but failed to see. The perennial desire for status, wealth, and security pervades every level of work, and subtly hides itself under the guise of the nobler claims of scientific pursuit, servitude to society and academic rigor. Over the past few months, have also come, from friends, news of divorce and separation, largely contributed from workaholism and neglect. Work, has commanded unusally high power in many of our lives, and I began to become increasingly disillusioned with its fluffy notions of altruism and excellence. Work, designed by God, has an extraordinarily divine place in our lives, but has corrupted and claimed lives through greed for recognition, want for money and its undeserved excessive occupation of our time.
Somewhere in between the days of disappointment and exhaustion, fear and politics, twenty-four hour calls and the wrong end of Disdain, I made a drastic decision to step out of the hospital, if not forever, then at least for a season. I wanted to reclaim, for myself at least, the meaning of work. I needed to know I was more than a cog and wheel spinning endlessly in a gigantic machine of a system, and needed to rediscover the satisfaction, fulfilment, and joy that God had designed work to be. As I continued to watch marriages and relationships around me disintegrate because of neglect, I knew I had to make a decision about whether to continue pursuing hours and hours of sub-joyful work or to put a screeching halt to this madness. After all, if the cog became rusty and stopped working, it would simply be discarded and replaced by a million other eager cogs waiting anxiously in line.
So I got out.
“Everyone will be forgetten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best,
will come to naught. Unless there is God.
If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life,
then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, c
an matter forever.”
-“Every Good Endeavour” by Timothy Keller.
I am, like you, in pursuit of the good endeavour that matters. That which has some sort of eternal permanence, even if it means putting my heart into speaking hope into just one person’s life, saying hello to the lovely malay cleaning lady (her name is Ida) who cleans our whole clinic every day, even if it means putting together a home-cooked meal for my husband when he is hungry . There is, in all of our hearts, an eternal longing to accomplish something of eternal permanence and significance. We all want to know that what we do matters to others, matters to God. I needed time to reflect on that.
So I got out. And I chose public health as my next rotation. No patients, no hospital duties, no overnight shifts, no twenty-four hour calls, no weekend ploughing. Just an 8.30am to 6pm desk job working with people from psychology, marketing and scientific backgrounds to formulate campaigns, drive social movements and write policies to help promote and create a healthy environment for the man on the street. I am hoping, that in the gaps between work and rest, where I would otherwise be running in that wheel in the gigantic slavedriving machinery, that I might delve deeper into the heart of God and emerge with some glimpse of the glory of the purpose of the work and calling that God had and has placed in the core of my heart.
Tolkien wrote a story called “Leaf by Niggle“. Niggle, as an english word, means to work in a fiddling or ineffective way. In Tolkien’s story, Niggle was a painter, and he had a long journey (death) to make, and though the whole idea was distasteful to him, he could not get out of it. So he decided to paint a masterpiece of a Tree before he had to be taken away. Every day, he told himself, “I have to get this one picture done, before I head out on that wretched journey.” Day and night he worked on this canvas, but was constantly distracted by doing things his neighbours called him to do for them. After a long time, he had only accomplished painting but “one beautiful leaf” which glowed. The Driver comes to take Niggle away, and he weeps and bursts into tears, “Oh dear! And it’s not even finished!” But it doesn’t end there. Niggle goes on a train to a heavenly afterlife. A voice called Justice severely rebukes him for wasting his life and accomplishing so little. But a voice called Mercy counters it for the sacrifice Niggle made for others. As a reward, he gets a Tree, finished, with its leaves open and glowing that he could finally enjoy forever. In his book “Every Good Endeavour“, Timothy Keller writes of how each of us is a Niggle. We all imagine accomplishing great things, yet, everyone finds himself largely incapable of producing the greatness we dreamed of.
We all need to know this. There really is a Tree. There really is a city of brilliance and beauty, glorious and glowing. Our work will only be partly successful in bringing that world to earth, bringing that sense of hope, glory and redemption here. But inevitably, if we believe in God, that beauty, wholeness and joy will come to fruition. You will no longer be despondent because you are painting only a leaf.
Which is what I have largely been doing in clinics seeing the neverending line of patients, day in, day out- painting a leaf. Perhaps, by choosing public health, with all its ideals of changing systems and making a difference to communities as a whole, I am trying to paint a larger leaf. But that is not the point. What I have learnt, is that no matter what work we do, it becomes senseless to sacrifice friendship, family, and love in the desperate attempt to paint the whole tree. The Driver will come. The voice Justice will rebuke us. And it is only the sacrifice we made for others and the love we shone on their lives that will allow Mercy to come and redeem us from condemnation and show us the Tree that we spent our whole lives waiting for. So now I shamelessly spend my free time with people who matter, with Cliff, whom I never know when the Driver will come to take away in a carriage.
“Are you saying your money is more important than our fellowship?” I ask Grandpa Zhou again. He fights and struggles to formulate reasons, but they all fail. He is holding on to a two-dollar bill. I tell him to hold it tight in a fist.
“That’s all of us, trying to cling onto money and what we think is important,” I say. “Now release it and put your palms open to the sky like this,” I demonstrate. “And that’s us, letting things go so God can show us what is more important. What is important is what the eye cannot see. Things like friendship, love, fellowship.”
He nods. We pray together, for God to help him release what he thinks will help him achieve an end-goal. He opens his eyes, and agrees to come for dinner.
We might see the leaf we paint. But The Tree, that is invisible, awaits us.
So don’t be discouraged.
Close your eyes, see the Tree.
God, has a purpose for your work.
Give it to Him with open palms, and hold on firmly to what you cannot see.
photo by lettherebelight, Cliff & Wai Jia’s wedding
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.
For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
-2 Cor 4:18