Crying Over Spilled Milk

For those of you who don't know, I have something of a swearing problem. Not so much casually or in place of adjectives, or even when relatively great or terrible events take place. No, I generally only swear like a sailor when very trivial disappointments take place. These include dropping something I meant to put in the microwave, leaving a book out in the rain, losing some small trinket, or, quite literally, spilling a glass of milk, especially if it was the last one in the fridge and I meant it to go with some particular snack.

Rather than find it odd that I swear at trivial travesties, I used to think it was stranger that I didn't lose my cool when things of some importance happened: losing a job, death, a fight, a letter of rejection. In those big things, one feels the import clear enough, one sees the meaning behind big decisions or moments, and there doesn't really seem to be a need for you to contribute much of a hype to the whole thing in the form of a response. To put it simpler, everything is already important enough without your small voice giving it an air of importance, and you feel important enough handling a real tragedy to need to amplify anything with obscenities.

Now swearing at all the little things, then, bespeaks a lack of confidence that such trivialities, and the importance placed in them, add up to anything resembling importance. To them, then, I begin to add such magnitude as all manner of sound and fury can. In a larger way, I think its connected somewhat to a level of boredom men can feel in their daily work when they're not sure the work they do is meaningful. Since we don't kill huns or wolves all day, a neighbor's bad parking job or a stuck jar of pickles become the big trial for the day.

For those of you who don't know what exactly it is that I do, I've recently gone through a pretty lateral move within the same company (and in the same location), and the long and short of it is that I research and write full time now at a location three time-zones away from the rest of the office, making my contact with the outside world rather limited to the times I can find an excuse to use a library or post office. So I make no product outside of word documents that will one day be footnotes of footnotes of footnotes in publications, and I swear when I lose my pens (but they are really good pens).

So begins the task of reminding myself that my sphere, rather than production-oriented, is truly domestic: For the (married) Christian man, and really a great many societies historically, one's wage-earning is secondary to the role he plays in his home. Indeed, his role as carpenter or millwright is only good insofar as it enables his roles as husband and father. And so I tell myself that, even if I make no product and feel as though I don't get paid (direct deposit sort've takes the fun out of payday) the work keeps my family in house and home, well-fed, clothed, and generally provided for. For those who care, Luther's Large Catechism is excellent at reminding the reader of the importance of doing one's daily work. And then I pray for thankfulness and forgiveness. And then I swear because I can't find the recording I made of a friend lecturing on the Seven Years War a little over four years ago.

Romanticism is alive and well I guess, for even if I do not want an adventure where I'll go find myself, the desire to have some sort of job where I do very grave and important things indeed, like some epic hero that happens to wear a tie (thats a lie, my dream job has chain-mail). But all that really means is that is that I'm forgetting my place in the chain. So glory be to God for dappled things, that spilled milk may be the worst upset of my day, and that my life's importance is not anything I win for myself, but that its worth is imparted by Him who made it and preserves it.