Vomit

I started summer break a couple of weeks ago – after resigning from Meta I was afforded the fantastic opportunity to take a sabbatical before diving into my next role at the end of July. 

I haven’t had an extended period of rest like this since my school days, really – I took paternity leave for each of my three children, but months with a newborn aren’t really known for their restorative qualities.  Two months, more-or-less, that I’ve already started filling with plans.  I’ll do more writing, get back to the gym regularly, clean out our closets, prioritize prayer.  I’ll start lego robotics with the older kids, we’ll master potty training with the youngest, we’ll ride our bikes regularly and we’ll redo the boys’ room with desks and dressers better befitting young elementary students. 

The timing of my break overlapped with one blessed week where all three boys were still in school – I could do whatever I wanted for myself without the demands and feelings and fights that young children bring with them – such luxury!  I had spent weeks daydreaming and living in this stretch, eeking out a preemptive delight just in imagining such freedom from responsibility – something I really craved after the last several operationally intense and politically charged months at Meta. 

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The Sunday before my solo week started our youngest came down with a stomach flu.  Another son caught the flu on Tuesday; my wife and I caught it later that evening.  We spent the entire week cleaning various fluids, washing a mountain of laundry, lying in bed feeling miserable along with our sons.  I passed a parenting rite-of-passage I’d been dreading, vomiting alongside my son and then cleaning up after both of us.  

My solo (ha!) week ended, I accomplished none of the things I hoped for – I exited this time of rest even more exhausted, frustrated that my vacation had been snatched away from me in such miserable fashion.

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C.S. Lewis, writing as Uncle Screwtape, addresses this notion – that my time was stolen from me, that my solo week belonged to me and that I’ve suffered a grievous injustice by way of this illness.  

“Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.... Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.  It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-a -tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear.  

[...]  They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”

Thinking and praying about this time I keep feeling like the Holy Spirit is teaching me something here – a small reminder that there’s no such thing as my time.  That finding real comfort in some unmaterialized future is folly – “You fool!”, cries the Lord in the parable – “This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”.  

Maybe this is a warning – do I store other treasure in the future, absent God?

My experience with tech compensation has followed this pattern.  Meta, for instance, pays mostly in equity that vests quarterly – I would regularly look months down the road and fantasize about stability that will come one day when enough vests clear.  My new role has a cliff – I’m already starting to worry about “surviving” until the cliff hits, allowing my anxiety to build until some imagined security where I’ll finally have enough financially.

Our youngest son will be three in the fall – my wife and I like to wax romantic about how close we are to being normal people again, that we’re maybe months away from exiting the intense demands of early childhood and ready to reemerge back into adult society.  Once the kids are more self-sufficient we’ll be able to play tennis together, go on regular dates, rekindle fading friendships, take on more adventurous travel – things that have naturally fallen off as we navigate the all-encompassing logistics and emotional energy of early childhood parenting.  We’re treading water right now, but I can find escape from the grinding down by losing myself into pictures of a time where all the lost joys of adulthood will be restored to us.

Then there’s ministry – it’s so easy to imagine a distant version of myself that’s capable, well-spoken and well-read, that’s mastered a life of prayer and is fully qualified to speak the truth into peoples’ lives, that’s empowered by some future holiness to work mercies and justice that I can’t imagine right now.  I don’t need to evangelize now – I can do it when I’ve matured more, when I’ve clarified my testimony and I have something to say that will move people to God.  I’m not ready yet, but deep in my own head I can savor victories that haven’t yet happened – sometimes daydreaming of my own righteousness is enough to sate any nascent hunger for real righteousness that God might have been stirring in me.  

There’s clearly danger in these kinds of fantasies – I think some part of this week was meant as a warning that life doesn’t happen in the future, that my own plans are not to be idolized.  The future is God’s domain and not a bank I can draw on for my own delight. Vomit week made this crystal clear in microcosm, taking freedom that I’d already emotionally withdrawn and melting it away before my eyes.  My duty is to take each day as it comes and live it to the best of my ability, finding hope and comfort in God and not the uncertainty of the future.  

Planning and hoping aren’t bad things, but they must not be mistaken for real joy and real peace. Christ advises us not to worry about tomorrow.  C.S. Lewis puts it poetically – “Never, in peace or in war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future... Happy work is best done by those who take their long-term plans somewhat lightly and work from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

Finding my security in some unpromised future is foolishness – maybe reinforcing this during this liminal season was, in reality, the best use of my solo week, and God delivered this sickness as a mercy.  The experience was certainly visceral – I hope that, when my mind starts drifting and worrying and planning – I’ll remember lying on the couch next to my son trapped excruciatingly in the present, with no hopes or plans or goals beyond the next few moments, submitting my entire self to desperate prayer and dependence on God.