To Leave Undone…

To Leave Undone…

Turning off my hot staggered engine, time for that hot metal transport to get a break. I grabbed my bag with my head full of stuff- some of it feeling real important and the rest more futile. It was another blurred edge day with serrated in-between and it cut through me like I was the room temp butter.

Days like these come and go and at the end I simply feel like an overused tool, a gadget that can do just about anything…maybe more like the multi-tool on my brown belt. A valuable thing in a time of crisis but nothing you would build a house with. Jack of all trades- like Jack Bauer of the TV show “24” I can come through in just about anyway needed to get the job done. I am necessary, functional, true tested, creative at solutions done on the go. I can deliver the goods.

But I cannot enjoy my work…the work coming to my hands does not pause or stop to consider me…it is never, ever, ever completely satisfied. Each task is all-important, time sensitive and persistent and it always leaves me with a reminder that at some level all my work will remain, as I remain on earth, at some level forever and irrevocably undone. That leaves me undone in many ways, and my soul suffers unaware. I have become a well worn tool within a world of projects swirling around my head, “You Complete Me…NOW!”

Pulling myself from the matrix I learn just how lost I have become and where I have traded my Sonship for a toolbox.

That is why I am being trained in the surrender of Shabbat, which in Hebrew understanding and teaching is “to leave undone”. It does NOT mean to complete and then leave. Nor is it to take the “undone” with you so that you can finish it later. It is unapologetically vacating the premises, leaving the handle, and all that needs to be finished...unfinished.

Picture that you are a farmer and it is time to plant seeds today so you may have a harvest tomorrow. You are plowing your field towards the end of the day and you have finished only half of what you intended to because some pesky birds came and stole some of the seeds. 3 rows of beans are still uncovered, and the time comes to stop. You know you must leave the beans, the rows, and the field. It is the time to rest and lay down the plow and take the team home. But you want to rush back and cover over the beans from those birds and maybe plow one more row before the night falls.

We are pulled into some fear of the undone. Something linked heavily into our interior belief system- that we are only valuable if we finish something. Tie it tight with a bow and set it in the corner, nail it shut, paint it to match, seal it from rain…or else! Something wars with us and it masks itself as responsibility- but this has nothing to do with the noble pursuit of being responsible. It has everything to do with how my value is welded into my ability to produce.

What I am asked to leave is more than a task- for embodied in that task is my system of certainty, of controlling my value to the world that the world cannot take away from me. It is my daily grinded proof, my earned star, and my achieved credentials that I can point on the day they may be questioned to lock in my value based only on the fact of this completed task.

And as I am holding up my partially finished task #11245 of #36882 my Father speaks to me and says, “My son, leave it undone.”

The tears come and warm my eyes just at the mention of these words. I am awakened by the voice of my Father asking me to leave the day and this task undone while the world is screaming, “Finish it now…or else!!”

I argue with him “But Father I must finish this, for this very task says I am so valuable to them- it is my ticket to financial success and it will secure my future.”

Kindly with confident renderings He smiles and says, “If you don’t leave it undone, you will become it and you are far more valuable than a completed task to me. Let’s leave it together.”

Leaving something undone is no small thing. It is a good thing to complete our work and we receive pleasure from a job well done. Yet to learn Shabbat, to fully rest and be restored, we must leave so many things undone.

But it is the way of the daughter who’s Father is delighted in her simply because of who she is, nothing more or added is necessary. The Father enjoys the son not because he finishes the work, but only because he is his son and they are together. They work hard together and share the weight of the day. Then at the end of the day they put down the plow and leave it undone- together. The demanding voices inside and outside the son’s head fade as they walk away together laughing about the day, away from simmering tasks and charted maps…and away from cooling engines.