Here’s a story I originally wrote at the beginning of 2020 regarding events that took place in the Fall of 2014. A break from your regularly scheduled project programming to talk about, well…more projects, because at the end of the day, what am I actually working on here? Let’s find out. Here’s the previous episode if you missed it.
Again, I saw vanity under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. (Ecclesiastes 4:7-9)
Unveiling Project Junior
When this episode with the headlights happened we were on the verge of being handed our fourth child. Life was already about as busy as I could conceive of it being, but I knew it would go to another level in a matter of months. I was already having trouble "finding time", not realizing that what I actually needed was the wits to use what I already had. Nobody gets more.
At the end of October, to my own surprise I finished one of the Jeep projects I was working on. Now seen soberly it was probably not the one that needed to be done first, but the order of importance makes no difference, especially when we unveiled this blue Jeep Cherokee with its Radio Flyer wagon chassis. The boys were instantly in love with the thing. The headlights could wait another day. My son's overdue birthday present couldn't.
We'd gotten a Radio Flyer wagon at our first son's baby shower, a forever ago four years before this, and we'd never really done anything with it other than pile stuff on top. It made a good place to start.
Thankfully building something that looks like a Jeep Cherokee is about as easy as building something that looks like a box. And that's essentially what I did, with a bit of Bondo and spray paint mixed in. Now the boys had a Jeep of their own, and for the moment theirs would be a bit cooler than mine.
Slowing Down to Start Keeping Up
In the last installment I mentioned that this birthday present project was not something that I chose to do out of purely altruistic motives. I think honestly, somewhere deep down, it was something to hide behind, something to distract away from the bigger, grayer elephant in the driveway.
My Cherokee's headlights were still not working, and I was still not working on them.
I was procrastinating, making excuses, throwing up smoke, hiding, and ignoring the responsibilities right in front of me. But why was I doing all this? Why couldn’t I just get this stupid issue finished? Why did I have to make everything so complicated?
Yet, unbeknownst to me at the time, hidden within this string of foolish decisions was a nugget of grace. I wasn't going to find more time hidden in the couch cushions. I wasn't going to find it infinitely spreadable if evenly dispersed between all of the varied demands in my life.
Just slow down.1
And by slowing down, I found that to mean all the way down to a pace that would allow the boys to join in and follow along. Some projects would therefore have to take the scenic route to completion, often having to stop to pee every thirty minutes. And in this case if I had a Jeep that needed attention, I figured the boys needed one to occupy their attention too.
Spending time together is just another way of sharing time, and everybody gets a little richer when you share. If you give your time to someone else, you don't lose it. By giving you make others richer, but never do you find yourself poorer as a result.
Now that sounds like the sap you’d read inside a cheap birthday card for an old person, so it’s probably not quite right.
But at the end of the day, aren’t we all just moving dirt around? And since the Jeep is inevitably going to rust into the ground someday anyways, why not at least work on it with somebody worth spending time with? That sounds like something an old person would write in the book of Ecclesiastes, so it’s probably a bit closer to being right.
Regardless, it was time to get back to work and finish this project.
Again, I saw vanity under the sun: one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, “For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?” This also is vanity and an unhappy business. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. (Ecclesiastes 4:7-9)
A note from the future…there’s a reason “slow and STEADY wins the race” is in our proverbial lexicons. Slow for its own sake resigns you to being about as esteemed and useful as a D.M.V. employee. See Doug Wilson’s Ploductivity for the best treatment on how not to be a D.M.V. sloth person.