Sharpening Pencils

When I was a young teenager, I decided that I was disgusted by my lack of productive accomplishments. I set a goal to keep busy even if it meant sharpening pencils. I had a large box of unsharpened pencils and it wasn't long until I had nothing to do, so I began sharpening pencils. I have always looked back on that as pathetic immaturity. I traded the meaninglessness of doing nothing with the meaninglessness of sharpening pencils - or did I?

There seems to be value in work, even if it is trivial work. There seems to be no value in doing nothing. In fact, it seems like doing nothing is squandering the priceless, finite resource of life. If so, it is not neutral, rather it has harmful, if not evil. I may have ended up with a box of sharp pencils but I also ended up with a few minutes not "doing nothing". By "Doing Nothing" I don't mean rest. Rest is an active, necessary and significant action. I also don't mean "Silence. That is a deliberate choice to quiet the soul and experience God. Doing nothing is the purposeless waste of time, which has consumed large portions of my life over the years.

I hopefully can find more valuable ways to spend the precious minutes of my life than sharpening pencils, but it seems that even that trivial event is dramatically more valuable than the vacuum of purpose that it replaced. If a sharpened pencil can be significant, how much more can praying, loving, serving, caring, encouraging, sharing, writing, reading, listening, and helping. All of which are around me and available to be picked up any moment of the day - and sharpened.