All I Need Is Jesus and a Good Pair of Jeans: The Tired Supergirl's Search for Grace by Susanna Foth Aughtmon Page B

absolutely handle three more things, maybe even four. She has great faith in your ability to save the world, single-handedly, and still have time for devotions.
    My mom told me that when she was little, she was taught that the word JOY stands for J esus, O thers, and Y ou. She used to sing it in a song about how joy equals putting Jesus first, then sandwiched in the middle you put others, and then whatever you do, put yourself last and you will have joy. Like the three slices of the proverbial pie of how to live your life. But if that is the case, does housecleaning fit in under the “you” category because you like having your house clean or the “others” category because you are clearing a path from the living room to the bathroom so that “others” can get through? And which part of the pie should go for that budget you need to finish at work and that charitable book drive you agreed to help out with? And there is only so much pie, you know.
    Besides that, the world at large is telling us supergirls that we need some me time. That we have neglected our own needs and we need good boundaries and such, so that our lives can be more productive. So maybe we shouldn’t put ourselves last because if we don’t care for ourselves, then how can we care for others? So how much of your life’s pie is allocated to me time? Does me time include the times when a tired supergirl is sitting in her cubicle at work by herself? Because if not, we are going to have to pencil it in around 1:27 in the morning, when we are fast asleep, because the rest of our day is jam-packed with business meetings, family meal times, and a workout session with Helga, our personal trainer. And as for Jesus, we think he needs a whole pie dedicated just to him because our real-life pie has no slices left. Supergirl alert! You can’t do it all. Nope! It just cannot be done.
    Forget the whole pie thing. If we are endlessly slicing our pies, at the end of the day, all we supergirls have left to offer Jesus is a few crumbs. Time with God can’t be something we try to squeeze in between, say, 2:00 and 2:27 in the afternoon. We can’t just offer up a chunk of time to the God of the universe. We have to offer him ourselves. All of us. All of our time. We can’t look at spending time with God as a set “devotional time.” We have to emulate the one who came in the flesh and looked at spending time with God as a “devotional life.”
    Jesus modeled complete devotion to God. He was available to God all day long. Any time of day or night, he was ready. Just give the word and he was willing to go, do, be, say whatever God had for him at that moment. That included attending weddings or teaching in the synagogue. He wasn’t boxed in by a certain amount of minutes spent in prayer or the weekly couple of hours spent in a pew or by what other people thought he should be doing for God.
    The Pharisees, the Miz Do Goods of their time, tried to get Jesus locked into their God time frame. They wanted him to keep the Sabbath holy. That is what their religious culture had designated as “Time for God.” It is all laid out neatly in the Ten Commandments: “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”
    In Luke 6:6–11, the story of Jesus’s thoughts on the Sabbath unfolds:
    On another Sabbath day, a man with a deformed right hand was in the synagogue while Jesus was teaching. The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees watched closely to see whether Jesus would heal the man on the Sabbath, because they were eager to find some legal charge to bring against him. But Jesus knew their thoughts. He said to the man with the deformed hand, “Come and stand here where everyone can see.” So the man came forward. Then Jesus said to his critics, “I have a question for you. Is it legal to do good deeds on the Sabbath, or is it a day for doing harm? Is this a day to save life or to destroy it?” He looked around at them one by one and then said to the man, “Reach out