Today at Mere Orthodoxy, I review one of the most encouraging books I’ve read this year–Drew Dyck’s Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything. Here’s the beginning portion of my review, by way of a taste:
Sometime in the mid-sixth century BC, one of the greatest empire builders of the age, king Croesus of Lydia, reportedly met the Athenian lawgiver Solon. One of the legendary Seven Sages of Greece, Solon was at the time on a self-imposed sightseeing tour abroad, and Croesus was eager to meet him and get his stamp of approval.
At the height of his power at the time, Croesus gave Solon a tour of his treasuries, palaces, and all things spectacular he could imagine. At the end of this grand tour, he asked his honored guest a very simple question: Who is the happiest (or, more literally, most blessed) of all men? The answer, to Croesus’ utter shock, was not the one he expected.
Instead of praising Croesus’ many blessings through which he had just paraded, Solon went off on an unexpected (and, to Croesus, deeply frustrating) tale about this nobody Athenian man, who was just an ordinary plain old boring citizen. This guy loved his city, loved his family, raised sons who also loved the city. Then one day, when Athens was at war, he fought honorably for the city and helped it win the war. He died in battle and was buried on the battlefield—a final honor and exclamation mark capping a life well lived.
To Solon, these were the lives best lived: lives of very ordinary people who didn’t have anything special about them. Except they faithfully served others day-in, day-out, seeing needs and filling them without expecting any sort of fanfare in return.
We can laugh at Croesus, who had an awfully hard time understanding that there are more important things in life than wealth and power and various other ways of showing off these assets. But more often than not, if asked to name life goals and dreams, we readily get in touch with our own inner Croesus, even if (hopefully) in a less crass way. We dream big—both in defining our prosperity and happiness, and in terms of what we think we must accomplish to feel successful or blessed. That’s a lot of pressure, much of it self-imposed. Years down the road, most of us feel like we never achieved what we wanted. Such spiritual ground, focused on what is lacking rather than what is present in our lives, is perfectly primed for a mid-life crisis of ennui and depression.
But what if we’re going about this process of goal-setting all wrong? What if the best thing we can do—in our family life, in church and in our walk with God, and in our service to the democracy—is just show up?
That is precisely the argument that theologian and editor Drew Dyck makes in his latest book, Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything. Big dreams of changing the world came naturally during seminary and life BC (Before Children), he recollects. Then real life hit like a tsunami—in the form of what seems like the usual American dream: marriage, a job, kids. Overwhelmed by this disconnect between lofty dreams and the difficulties of surviving each grueling marathon of a day, Dyck wrote this book to argue for the simplest yet, it turns out, most Biblical goal of all: showing up.
Just keep plodding without ceasing. This is, first and foremost, Christ-like behavior in a literal sense. Sure, Jesus performed some extraordinary miracles during his earthly ministry. But most of the time, what he did was just live life with other people around him, showing up in the flesh in the midst of ordinary activities, joyful and mournful. That is the significance of the Incarnation, of God becoming flesh and dwelling with other people for over three decades of ordinary life.