Random Ramblings from a Fellow Struggler #7

Every Friday we’ll take a break from topical posts and will post some random personal thoughts.

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Random Ramblings from a Fellow Struggler #7

Woke up this morning to find my fifteen year old asleep on the couch, where he’d decided to spend the night instead of in his own bed. This has become a pattern, and I’ve been a little bewildered by it, since we’ve provided him with a perfectly good, if somewhat small, bedroom. With a bed. That works.

“But I hate making the bed”, he murmured when I asked him why he’d fallen asleep on the couch yet again. Then he flopped over on his side and went comatose, and though I wanted to argue I’ve learned there’s no point in looking for intelligent discourse with a sleepy teen. We’ll talk about this later today, I promise myself, then I stomp into the kitchen and vent to Renee about the laziness inherent in the act of sleeping on the couch just to avoid making a bed.

“Where’d he get the laziness, I wonder”, she asks, looking at me superciliously over her coffee cup. She’s an evil woman, especially when she’s right.

She was referring, I’m sure, to my countless unreturned phone calls and e-mails; projects past due; overdue bills; loose ends of all sorts. Stacks of papers on my desk accent the boxes of books and materials scattered around my office, and my suitcase from a trip to Costas Rica two weeks ago is half unpacked, with shirts and undershorts obscenely poking through the sides, trying to escape. They know they belong in the wash. I don’t care. I hate making the bed.

If there’s a major crisis in my life, I’m really pretty good at rising to the occasion. You’d be glad for my company in the event of an earthquake or terrorist attack, but don’t ask me to make the bed. It’s the smaller life stressors that are my undoing, not the big ones.

“Catch us the foxes”, the Song of Solomon reminds us, “the little foxes that spoil the vines.” (Song of Solomon 2: 15) While men (including this one) seem better at the heroic than the mundane, it’s the mundane, and our willingness to deal with it or ignore it, that can be our undoing. So I’m committing right now to take the little foxes seriously, roll up my sleeves and attack the boring rather than the heroic today. It’s poor stewardship to do anything less.

Jeremy’s not off the hook, though. I just jumped on his bed and rolled around like a demented old man. Now it needs making. It’s for his own good. Wouldn’t want him to grow up with unpacked suitcases, after all.