After spending so long in a confinement situation, the kind lady of the parsonage planned a short vacation for us. It took him a long time to put all the pieces together, but he managed it as usual.
As I was preparing for this little adventure, my wife looked at me and said, “What are you putting in that bag?”
I looked at her, smiled and said, “I’m putting up some projects that I want to update while we’re on vacation.” Then I shot him another smile in his direction. “This is going to be wonderful,” I told him.
She looked at me, both hands on her hips and said, “You’re not going to take on any projects on this trip. The whole plan is that we don’t do anything. Do you understand?”
I must say that I was not quite ready for this. When we left, I thought I could take time to catch up on some projects I was working on. I always have a project in the wind.
“This time,” said my wife quite sternly, “it’s so that we don’t do anything and do it together.”
From the tone of his voice, I could tell he was serious and not joking. Over the years, I have been able to detect these kinds of things. I still don’t have it all figured out, but I’m getting it done. This tone of his voice I knew quite well.
“Couldn’t you just take a project?” I tried to show the best smile I had, but to no avail.
“This is a very important time for us to do nothing. And I will make sure that we will do absolutely nothing on this little vacation together.”
This was quite new to me. Although sometimes I don’t do much, I’ve never gotten to the point where I’m actually doing nothing. I’m not sure how that feels.
“You don’t need to worry about this.” My wife said when she saw me frown. “I’ll take care of this and help you do nothing while we’re gone. When we’re done, you’ll thank me.”
We got to our motel, I checked in, and we settled into our room.
I sat on a chair in the corner, looked at my wife and happily said, “Well honey, what do we do now?”
I was hoping that she had been teasing me the entire time and I would be able to do something. After all, in my humble opinion, doing something is much better than doing nothing. However, don’t quote me on that.
“We’ll get some rest here,” he said, “and then we’ll go out to dinner.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to hold back a laugh, “but isn’t that doing something?”
Obviously, she didn’t get the joke and looked at me with one of “those looks.”
So, I thought, this is how it will be on our short vacation. I had to think of something without her knowing I wasn’t doing anything and catch her off guard.
We went out to dinner up the street from our motel and really enjoyed ourselves.
When the check arrived, I looked at my wife and said, “This sure is fun doing nothing.”
She looked at me and then looked away, and I knew I had done something contrary to her rules of doing nothing.
He knew he had to get it and it wasn’t going to be easy.
As we drove around the block to get back to our motel, we passed a thrift store. I looked at my wife, pointed to the thrift store, and said, “Hey, look at that! Do you want to go into the thrift store?”
Before he could park the car, she went out the door and into a thrift store. I appreciate the moment because it’s a rare moment where I make one for it.
When he came out of the thrift store, he had several bags of whatever. I opened the door for him and said quite happily: “How much did it cost you to do nothing?”
“Okay,” he said, “I need these items for a project at home, and I really saved a lot of money at that thrift store.”
“So,” I said in the most dramatic way possible, “doing nothing is different from me doing nothing.”
“I’m sorry,” he said very sadly, “I made a mistake, so I’ll let you do one thing. What do you want to do?”
I must admit that this took me by surprise. For a moment I thought I was in control of the situation, and then it backfired. I tried to think of one thing to do and my brain just wasn’t working.
The more he thought about it, the less he knew what he could do. I don’t go shopping, so that was left out. All my projects were at home, so that was out of the picture. I couldn’t think of anything to do.
“I can’t think of anything,” I told my wife.
“That’s great. Now you’re not doing anything.”
While I was thinking of nothing, I remembered the Scriptures: “And as you want men to do to you, do the same to them also” (Luke 6:31).
Nothing is not that special, but sometimes the right thing can be really special.