You want, and cannot have

Rich Man Dilemma
Essay 1

When I wake up in the morning, before I get my coffee or even roll out of bed, I look at my phone. I want to know what time it is, of course. It’s the only clock I have. However, it also has a convenient, horrid little feature where the whole internet appears before me with the press of a button. Like habit, as if it were my very solemn duty, I check three things on my phone: email, texts, instagram. 
Let’s be clear: this is available to me because I am a stay-at-home mom. I can afford to sit in bed for a few minutes and scroll the news. I do not have to take a shower or get dressed or do anything besides feed my children breakfast on a summer morning.
To be honest, sometimes I cannot stand it, that I know I will not get anything done today. I might raise my voice in frustration–this is pretty much a given, since boys do not usually brush their teeth or pick up the living room out of the abundance of goodness in their nine year old hearts. I will inevitably make meals for picky, ungrateful children. I’ll listen to a three year old scream for a half hour before she gives into a nap. There will be no checklist to mark off, no paycheck at the end of my two weeks. It’ll just be another two weeks and another two weeks times a hundred at snail’s pace.
So when I look on instagram and see people on their ninth day of vacation in Italy while the grandparents watch their kids, I will burn with a self-righteous jealousy. At least I care enough about my kids to not abandon them for shrimp scampi, wine, and grownup adventures.

I comfort myself with pride: I am getting a lot of nothing done, but maybe it is a good kind of nothing. Maybe dragging them through Walmart and never giving into buying Pokemon cards builds fortitude. They are experienced with folding clothes and digging in the dirt. If out of boredom they have become hopelessly addicted to books and odd sink-plugging science experiments, does that not suffice as a good mom badge? They play well with others… Perhaps it is all related to a mom who stays at home and yells at them five times to get their teeth brushed before noon? Sure, I’ll settle for the consolation prize.

It’s true and noble, this way of thinking, but it would have been better for me to not frame it against my internet not-even-real-friend’s vacation pictures.  “Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life”–it isn’t so much about preventing bad things from coming in, but sieving my own water so my well isn’t a muddy pig pen. James alluded to this:
“Do you not know what causes quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” (James 4:1-2)
Everything boils down to jealousy, and we wouldn’t be feeling jealous if we’d just drop the things that cause us to feel so darn jealous. I might be happy if I wasn’t an internet busybody. I’d be less worried about me time, less ruffled over my inability to keep up with Joneses, less proud of my mundane victories. All in all, I’d have more room to love Jesus and the people around me.

This notion hooked its claws in my coattails and I dragged it around pitifully for several years. I want, and I cannot have. 

I write chapters in three minute increments, the time it takes for a kid to find me hiding with my laptop and interrupt with something of extreme importance: He hit me! I pooped and there’s no toilet paper. Teach me how to fold this ice cube into a paper towel (what?). Can I eat some cake? Mom, if you were a Viking, would you trust a vegetarian hunter dragon to catch food for your tribe?
Sometimes I allow myself to feel supremely irritated by their blatant disregard for my writing time. I think for the last ten years I have been raising kids that still cannot get their own dang toilet paper or cut a piece of cake. Aloud I say, “Stop playing with ice cubes!” and “No, I wouldn’t trust a vegetarian hunter dragon to catch my food.”

I am home with my kids, my husband is working hard to pay my bills, I am sleeping through the night, we are all healthy. I woke up this morning and took a hot shower and tonight I will kiss my people before I fall asleep. Tomorrow I will buy them Pokemon cards in payment for a summers’ worth of mowed back yard. This is all enough, it is plenty. Still I want, and I cannot have.

I lie on the couch at night, hanging onto the silent hours when I should already be in bed. I berate myself for not getting more done, for not having a cleaner house. I review the days’ events in my mind, wish I was a better mom, wife, friend. I let myself feel aggravated with people whose problems play footsie with my own insecurities.

My thumb mindlessly scrolls. I’m a couch potato, my eyes trained on a glowing miniature screen. And this is what those Instagram busybodies are singing to me, even as they innocently paint it glossy, empathetic, or empowering–”You’ll get your Hawaii timeshare/speaking gig/book deal/successful business someday!” 

It smells rotten, and what’s worse–I keep picking it up to smell it. I want and cannot have–this is true, but I am tired of it, the wanting. And I hope, because I know: there still is potential for it not to fully maim me. 

How many years can a body go on coveting without it costing your very soul? How long can I try to convince myself that I’m not really covetous? Who owns me, who feeds my well when I greedily swallow all the pictures of things I want and cannot have?

James cracks a whip with his words.

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.    James 3:13-16

The wise man–he says–lives quietly in deeds that are humble, undeclared, non-pixelated. Influencers and self-promoters, they wither in wisdom’s sunlight. They are, ultimately, the gatekeepers of disorder. Stay away! James warns.

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes and enemy of God.    James 4:4 

This truth hit me like a slap in the face. I decided to unhook Facebook and Instagram from my coattails. As if I owed Mark Zuckerberg or his cronies a blessed thing! Not my pictures, opinions, privacy, joy. I might very well want and cannot have, but I can certainly limit its loud, mocking voice. I could walk away from that little phone with the one magic button. I could get an old fashioned alarm clock to wake me up in the mornings.

This, I think, is the struggle of the rich young ruler Jesus speaks with in Luke 18. He is the Bible character to whom I best relate. The rich man, greedy and good as me, wanted to have it all, be it all. His cell phone tucked in his back pocket, he approached the Master and asked him what he needed to do in order to inherit eternal life. He was willing to add a new title to his resumé, sing at church on Sunday morning, sort out his recycling bins. So he was caught off guard when Jesus said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Lk. 18:22)
I imagine there was an awkward pause as the man thought about his latest Amazon Prime purchases and instinctively felt for the cell phone in his pocket so he could text his girlfriend what Jesus said (shocked emoji + bawling emoji). The story says, “When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy.” (Lk. 18:23)

I know this feeling. I want, and I cannot have. Jesus, I want to follow You, but You say I must let go in order to have more.  I especially have to let go of the things of this world, the things that look harmless but suck me into disorder and dirty my well.

Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”
(Lk. 18:24-27)

I have started to hate that phone in my pocket, the phone that wakes me up in the morning, the phone that causes desires to battle within me. How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 
But Jesus says what is impossible with man is possible with God.
This is the shred of hope.
Hope for the rich man.  
Hope for me.