He Gives to His Beloved

The sitcom Parks and Recreation spends its first five seasons convincing viewers that Jerry Gergich has nothing to show for his 40 years in government service. He is the schmuck in every room; the butt of every office joke; a hopelessly incompetent government employee (hold your jokes about redundancy). Meanwhile, his boss Leslie Knope is an insatiable workaholic, perpetually striving to outdo her last great success. When Jerry retires, Leslie pities him and decides to spend her first day off in years visiting him at home and try to cheer him up, since he’s probably sitting there dwelling on all his failures. What she finds instead is the ultimate twist.Jerry answers the door accompanied by his gorgeous wife Gayle, (played by supermodel Christie Brinkley), who is over-the-moon affectionate toward the big dope. They invite Leslie in to enjoy a homemade breakfast with his three perky and delightful daughters, who adore and admire their father. It’s like a bizarro-world. Jerry is talented and suave; his family is beautiful and happy. Later, as they peruse family photo albums full of joy and memories, Jerry assures Leslie, “I know I didn’t achieve all my work goals, but that doesn’t matter to me. The best part about working at the parks department was that I got to be home every night with my family at 5:00.” It’s perhaps the greatest surprise I’ve ever seen from a sitcom: Jerry is the hero.I couldn’t stop thinking about that episode as I studied Psalm 127 this week, and the deeper I dug, the more convinced I became that our cultural obsession with public productivity and success is not only wrong-headed but actually self-defeating. For all our emphasis on productivity, we fail more and more to produce anything of lasting value. It may seem at first that the Psalm is telling us to, like Jerry Gergich, sacrifice our work life for our home life (not altogether terrible advice for some of us). What it’s actually doing is reframing our understanding of what real, lasting productivity is by comparing our work to childbearing. Maybe the most productive things we can pour ourselves into are the ones over which we have the least control. This is a Psalm that encourages us to continue to take our work seriously while ceasing to take ourselves so seriously. Maybe that was Jerry's secret all along. Can’t wait to consider it with you.