Holy Uselessness
Learning to Rest in a Culture That Measures Everything
Hey friends,
Last week I spent an entire day producing absolutely nothing, and it might have been the holiest thing I did all summer. My family went to the Kansas City Zoo and Aquarium.
We walked in enormous circles. We stood in line for drinks and food. My son leaned over the stingray touch tank with his arm in the water, waiting for one of those silky creatures to glide under his hand, and when it finally happened his whole face lit up like a stadium. My daughter took a million photos and videos. It was such a special day.
We watched the penguins do their little penguin business. We took a photo in front of a zebra-striped truck. We got tired and sunburned and happy, and then we drove home with nothing to show for any of it. No output. No deliverables. Nothing crossed off a list. Just a camera roll full of joy and four tired people who enjoyed each other’s company.
Nothing Got Done
Somewhere on the drive home it hit me how rare that kind of day has become in my life. I am a person with a book manuscript and a newsletter, a church family, an ordination process, a social media presence, and if I’m honest, most of my days get measured by what they produce. I suspect most of yours do too. We live inside a culture that has trained us to justify our existence through output. Even our rest gets conscripted into the machine. We recover so we can perform. We take vacations to come back sharper. We optimize our sleep. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that a day is only as good as what it accomplishes, and we dragged that idea straight into our spiritual lives as well.
I know I did. For years my faith ran on the same fuel as my calendar. Quiet times were measured. Ministry was counted. Growth had metrics. I could tell you exactly what my walk with God produced in any given quarter, and I mistook that output for intimacy. What a shame.
The Day God Blessed
Here’s the thing that undoes all of that, and it’s sitting right there on the first page of the Bible. When God finishes creating, God rests. Genesis says God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. Read that again slowly.
The first thing in all of Scripture that gets called holy is not a mountain or a temple or a person. It’s a day.
And it’s specifically the day on which nothing got made.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a little book called The Sabbath that I return to constantly, and in it he describes the Sabbath as a palace in time. He argues that Judaism’s great cathedrals were never built out of stone. They were built out of hours. One day in seven, wholly set apart, gloriously unproductive on purpose. Heschel saw menuha, the Hebrew word for the rest God created on the seventh day, as a positive thing in its own right. Not the absence of work. A presence. Tranquility, delight, and peace as actual created things that God spoke into existence the same way God spoke light.
Ronald Rolheiser says something similar when he writes about the spirituality of enjoyment. He suggests that delighting in a created thing honors the One who made it, and that many of us are far better at duty than we are at delight. That really hits home for me. I know how to be dutiful in my sleep. Delight takes practice.
And honestly, the zoo itself preaches this. The psalmist looks at the sea in Psalm 104 and marvels that God formed Leviathan just to play in it. God made something enormous and wild for the sheer fun of it. Play is stitched into creation on purpose. The otters at the zoo seem to know this in their bones. They spend their whole day doing loops in the water for no reason anyone can identify. Nobody has ever asked an otter what it accomplished this week.
Practice Being Useless
So, here’s what I want to gently suggest to you.
Your worth was settled before you produced anything, and it will remain settled on the days you produce nothing at all.
A day spent walking in circles with people you love, drinking a soda, and watching penguins, is not a wasted day. It might be the most holy thing you do all month. It’s a body-level declaration that the world can run without you for an afternoon, that God’s delight in you was never tied to your output, and that grace has no metrics.
Some of you left churches that measured you constantly. Attendance, giving, serving, and converting. You know what it feels like to be a line item.
Friend, the God I keep meeting on the other side of all that is a God who blessed the unproductive day first, who builds palaces out of hours, who makes sea monsters for fun. Go be gloriously useless in that God’s good world. It counts for more than you know.
Put one useless block of time on your calendar this week. Two hours minimum. No errands, no self-improvement, and no catching up on anything. Wander a park, sit on a porch, or watch some animals do their thing. When the guilt shows up, and it will, just name it and let it pass.
I love to cook, and few things have shaped my cooking ability more than Samin Nosrat’s book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It’s brilliant.
There's a Netflix series by the same name and her joy on screen is downright contagious. She treats cooking as play rather than performance, which is maybe why it belongs in this letter.
On June 25, tens of thousands of Netherlands fans flooded downtown Kansas City ahead of their World Cup match at Arrowhead Stadium, marching in a sea of orange right past Resurrection Downtown. Someone caught an aerial photo, and I’ve circled our building in it.
All those strangers singing in the street together, accomplishing nothing, radiating joy. Such a fun time to be in KC.
I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.
This one hit a nerve! I'll work on it!
You're the real deal, Beau! We love you back!!! 💙
Great observations!