The To-Be List

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  

- Matthew 23:37-39

No matter how much I get done, it seems that there will always be things left undone.  Those words – left undone – are part of a prayer of confession in the Book of Common Prayer. We say, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” In another version of the confession, we say, “things done and left undone.”

When I was a teenager and I first began to really hear the words that I prayed, I thought that things left undone meant stuff like...
                        Studying for the test
                        Practicing the piano
                        Stretching properly after cross country practice
                        Feeding the gerbils
                        Doing my homework
                        Writing thank you notes
                        Cleaning my room

When I spoke those words in church each Sunday – “what we have left undone” – those are the things that filled my mind and made me feel like a less than entirely good person.  I rarely wrote Christmas thank you notes before Easter. I used the excuse that I’d wait until after my birthday (January 6^th) and then combine the two. That just made the task twice as large and made me feel doubly guilty for avoiding it. 

I can yet remember the feeling of walking to my piano lesson after another week of not much practice. It’s the feeling of dread that I have in a recurring dream where I’m a college student again and it’s finals week and I suddenly remember a class I signed up for that I haven’t ever attended.

The gerbils I feel genuinely terrible about. I’m quite sure that two gerbils died thanks to my negligence. That’s an awful feeling, to know that two animals starved to death because of me. So I’m not saying that doing things doesn’t matter. It does. But I’m not sure that my mental to-do list helps. So you understand what I mean, my mental to-do list isn’t really about doing things, it’s about wanting to have them done, so I can feel better about having done them, if that makes sense. 

Feeding the gerbils was on my mental to-do list for years – long after they were gone and the point had become moot. My mental to-do list helps me to worry, it helps me to feel guilty, it helps me to feel hopelessly busy, but it rarely actually helps me to do things. Had I instead, simply paid attention to my pets, I never would have needed to remember to feed them because I never would have forgotten to feed them in the first place.

_____________________

Now I hear the words that come after “what we have left undone”: “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” They are the words we heard this morning from the Gospel of Matthew – the Great Commandment.

“We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” It dawned on me recently (and quite belatedly I suppose) that this sentence is not the start of a new idea. It is a list of the things left undone. And they aren’t really things at all – not in the way I usually think of things. It’s not writing thank you letters. It’s not practicing the piano. It’s not even feeding the gerbils. Feeding pets is important, but hopefully it’s something that we do out of the love that we feel for them, not out of guilt, shame, or mere obligation. In my experience – and the experience of those poor gerbils – a to-do list is not nearly the motivator that love is.

There are so many things left undone every single day, right? That’s not just me, is it? Chasing that to-do list is tempting. And doing things is satisfying. Getting things done is satisfying. In my family – and maybe in some of yours – when someone comes back from shopping, we ask “how’d it go?” And if it went well, the answer is “it was a productive outing”. A productive outing. I bought a lot of stuff. I got things done.

The danger for me is getting stuck on the to-do list. Getting stuck rushing around. I’ve worked many summers up in Maine, at the camp of the Episcopal Diocese up there. Most days we work from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m. It’s hard to turn off the busyness. In the morning I’d be in the great hall, getting ready for the day, and I’d bump into one of the directors. It would go something like this. I’d say, “Sara, I’m looking for the blindfolds. The purple and green lycra ones. I know that Katherine was using them yesterday at camp craft and they’re not back in the resource room. Do you think she washed them or… oh, I mean good morning, Sara.” 

Good morning. 

It’s 7:30. I’ve already had a cup of coffee. I’m already running around. Already getting stuff done. I’m on my never-ending to-do list, not on God’s much, much shorter list: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s it. That's the list.

At the end of the day, God isn’t going to call me to account for the lycra blindfolds. Did I love today?  What if we replaced the words “by what we have done, and by what we have left undone” with “by who we’ve been, and by who we’ve failed to be.” Sure, there are actions that demonstrate love, but love is more about being than doing.

So maybe what I need is a to-be list. It could be pretty short I think. It wouldn’t replace the to-do list, but it would put the to-do list in its place. 

What’s on the to-be list? Love. Loving God. Loving my neighbors. Love.