Most Things Are Not on Fire

I was sitting in my home office, actually getting things done, when my son texted me: “Hey, my friend and I are coming over. Is that okay?”

I typed back: “Sure!”

My brain typed back: DEFCON 1.

Here’s something I’ve learned about myself. I am not a “peacefully lived-in home” person. I am a clean countertops, organized spaces, everything-in-its-place person. And when my house is in order, I genuinely feel better, calmer and more like myself.

That’s not a problem. Until it is.

The second I got that text, I was off. In twenty minutes flat, I scrubbed the stovetop, wiped the counters, polished the refrigerator, swept the floors, ran the dishwasher, threw in laundry, cleaned the bathroom, replaced the hand towel, and refolded every throw blanket on the couch like I was staging a model home five minutes before the buyers arrived.

At one point I caught myself dusting baseboards.

Baseboards.

Meanwhile, two teenage boys were en route to devour snacks and watch Star Wars. By the time they arrived, sweat was rolling down my face and my sweatshirt had become a terrible decision. Still, the house looked beautiful, and I had that brief moment of satisfaction where everything felt under control again.

A few minutes later, I realized I could not find my phone.

Everybody started helping me search. My daughter kept calling it while we checked couch cushions, drawers, cabinets, blankets, countertops, baskets, shelves, and every completely irrational location that suddenly seemed possible once panic enters the room. At one point I checked the refrigerator because apparently my brain had reached the stage where absolutely nothing sounded unreasonable anymore.

We even used the tracking app, which helpfully informed us that the phone was “somewhere near the house,” as if that narrowed things down at all.

Eventually I stopped long enough to breathe and think clearly. A little while later, I decided to search through the trash because desperation changes a person quickly. I dug through coffee grounds and sticky wrappers before heading into the garage to check the recycling bin.

There it was.

My phone was sitting in the recycling.

Somewhere in the middle of rushing from one task to another, I had accidentally thrown away the very thing I had been holding in my hand. That realization honestly felt bigger than the lost phone itself. I had become so hyper-focused on managing everything around me that I stopped paying attention to what I was actually carrying.

Sound familiar? We live in constant scramble mode, mind racing ahead to the next thing before we even arrive at the present one. We hustle to “get it all under control,” hoping that’s the secret to feeling okay.

Spoiler: it isn’t. In fact, you just end up sweaty.

Which is exactly where I was standing when my son’s friend walked out of the bathroom and asked, “Do you guys have any soap?”

The one thing I forgot that takes literally four seconds to refill, because I was too busy polishing grout lines no teenager has ever noticed.

This is, I think, exactly what Jesus was talking about with Martha. She is usually cast as the villain of Luke 10, the anxious one banging around in the kitchen while her sister Mary sits peacefully at Jesus’ feet. But Martha was not wrong to care. Hospitality was serious business in that culture. We are talking about a culture where if you did not offer a stranger bread and water and a place to rest, you had essentially committed a crime against God and also basic decency and also probably their entire extended family going back four generations.

All that Martha was trying to do was honor her guests and honor Jesus.

The problem was that she got so consumed by managing the environment that she missed the Person sitting in the middle of it.

Yet Jesus does not scold her. Instead, He says,

“Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.” Luke 10:41–42.

One thing. Not seventeen things. Not even the snack things.

Now it’s important to note that Jesus was not condemning hospitality. He was not saying the kitchen didn’t matter or that guests should fend for themselves. He looked at Martha and essentially said: you are spinning, and the one thing worth stopping for is right here in your living room.

Here is what I know about anxiety: it is a terrible project manager. It will convince you that everything is urgent and nothing is finished. It takes ordinary Tuesday responsibilities and runs them through a filter that outputs NATIONAL EMERGENCY. It does not distinguish between “the house is on fire” and “there are water spots on the faucet.” To anxiety, these are the same situation.

For me, urgency often shows up around my home. Someone else may feel it around parenting, work deadlines, finances, social situations, overstimulation, or the pressure to keep everyone emotionally regulated. One parent is trying to manage a child’s meltdown before it happens. Another is already anxious about whether the party they are attending will have gluten-free food options or whether the environment will be too loud and overwhelming. Someone else is mentally preparing for a difficult conversation that has not even happened yet.

Most of us have an area where we grip tighter and move faster because control feels safer than uncertainty.

Modern life quietly trains us to operate this way. We hustle, optimize, and color-code the calendar. And for a moment, we may even feel briefly, gloriously on top of things. We respond to emails at 11 p.m. because if we do not answer them tonight, tomorrow-us will have to deal with them, and tomorrow-us already seems overwhelmed enough. We meal prep on Sundays like we are preparing for a siege. We download a productivity app, then a second app to organize the first app, and forty-five minutes later we have beautifully managed systems but have not actually completed the task itself.

I refolded the throw blanket at a precise diagonal, stepped back, crossed my arms, and felt, for approximately four seconds, like a person who had genuinely figured it out. Not just the blanket. Life. All of it. Finances, relationships, the difficult email I had been avoiding, the weird tension with that one person, the thing I said in 2011 that I still think about sometimes. All of it, somehow resolved by the blanket. And then my phone buzzed and I was back.

That is the strange thing about anxiety-driven control. The relief it offers is real, but it is also fleeting. We convince ourselves that peace is waiting on the other side of perfect management, yet there is always another counter to wipe down, another notification to answer, another mess to solve, another thing threatening to fall out of place.

And then a teenager asks for soap.

That is the moment. That is Martha absolutely losing her mind over the figs or the flatbread or whatever the first-century equivalent of a charcuterie board was, just fully committed to the presentation, while the literal Son of God is in the next room probably just wanting to sit with her for five minutes. She nailed the setup. She missed the guest of honor—Jesus.

Spiritual formation, I think, starts the second we notice we are spinning. Not after we stop. We need to pause and ask, What am I actually solving right now? What would genuinely happen if I put this down? Is this an emergency, or does it just feel like one because my nervous system has forgotten the difference?

Most things are not on fire.

Even when they feel like it.

Most things are not as urgent as they feel. The dishes can wait. The clutter can exist for an hour without filing a formal complaint. And the countertop does not determine your worth.

Nobody pulled into your driveway today and thought, “I swear, if those throw pillows are not ethically sourced I am turning this car around.” They did not think that. That thought has never existed in a human brain. They came for you. The actual you.

They came for your presence, not your performance. And maybe that is part of what Jesus was trying to remind Martha of too. The meal mattered, but Jesus did not come simply to inspect the table settings, He came for relationship. Sometimes the holiest thing we can do is stop spinning long enough to actually be present in the moment we were so desperately trying to perfect.