To be suprised by toil.

I'm not sure how it keeps taking me be surprise. It's something that has always come with work. My earliest memories of working involved toil and ample frustration. One of my chores sometimes in the fall was to rake leaves. It seemed like every time I'd almost be done, the cat would jump in the pile and scatter it out a little. Later, the wind would blow and the cascade of leaves that flew across the yard was beautiful, but it added toil to my work. (Of course, sometimes, I was the one jumping in the pile to add to another's toil.)


In college the work was different. Instead of the long hours outside trying to tame the weeds that sprung up as the curse fell on Adam, I found my self hours and hours into papers in the dark basement of a library. The effects of toil on work in that basement looked different. The frustration of the power flicking when you forgot to save that last page of a paper. Crying over spilled milk because it landed on the laptop that you knew you couldn't afford to replace. I wrote more than one paper on my old blackberry because I couldn't get my laptop to turn on and the work had to be done.

Every job I've ever done has had toil and frustration to accompany the work. But it still takes me by surprise. I keep forgetting that I lived in a world marred by the effects of the fall. I live in a world that is so messed up by sin that it should surprise me more when things do work.


So when my work seems unproductive, when my voice goes out right as I'm starting to feel like my class is working, when half the class fails an exam that I just knew they were going to ace, when I realize it's been two weeks since I had a planning period, when schools get consolidated right as we see progress, when class sizes balloon to 32. Why am I surprised? In a sinful world, entropy rules. It takes work to simply maintain the current level of disorder. To bring things from a state of disorder toward order requires significantly more work.  I feel like I'm failing to simply maintain. Progress seems impossible. But my God is bigger than even the laws of physics. My God can take something from disorder and move it toward order. My God can change sinful hearts, even of the confusing hearts of 13 year old. I can't.


So I work, and I toil. I don't work with the assurance that anything will change, but I do work with the confidence that God is good and he's called me here. I do work with confidence that one day, when this world is no more, I'll know what it means to work without toil. I pray that God would allow the toil of my work to point me to that day when I'll no longer feel the heavy weight that sin had placed on this world.

"O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day."

          - Ro­bert Ro­bin­son