A few years back I read a series of blog posts arguing for the strenuous life. They took examples from historic figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to argue for living life assertively. The author argued for not simply allowing life to happen “to” us, but for grabbing life by the short-and-curlies and getting proactive in our drive towards something of substance. Those familiar with Roosevelt or Churchill won’t find it difficult to see an argument for strenuous life being made with these two as examples: from leading cavalry charges, to being prisoners of war, taming wild nations, leading nations to form the modern world, both took life by the neck and insisted that they get their lot out of it at the earliest possible opportunity.

At the I first read these articles, I didn’t necessarily consider that I was leading a particularly strenuous life. My day-to-day rarely involved being more than a few kilometres from home, didn’t require a raised heart rate, and definitely didn’t seem to place life and limb even remotely at risk. But hindsight is often a much better judge of a situation than we consider in the moment, and in retrospect I think there’s a argument that my life was a bit strenuous.

An average day was an outreach hosting one. Here’s a run down:

0430-Alarm rudely awakes me. Stumble out of bed to the outdoor shower…wash quickly, the water is frigid.
0500-Climb into the truck and drive to the nearby bakery. Patiently wait to buy bread while internally cursing other customers who are being rude, yelling, not waiting their turn.
0530-Arrive back at home. Boil kettle. Must have coffee ASAP to reduce anger caused by irritating bakery customers.
0545-Prepare breakfast for 10-20 young people. Pancakes or french toast, scrambled eggs, fruit.
0630-A groggy half-awake helper arrives to prepare lunch stuff. First coffee finished, begin second cup.
0700-Outreach teams begin to surface for breakfast and to pack lunches. Sit down and join everyone for a few minutes, wolfing down some food and perhaps a bit more coffee.
0730-Transform into some kind of weird circus master as the entire hoard of people rush about cleaning, washing dishes, tidying and sweeping.
0830-The teams are ready to goto wherever they are doing ministry today. Often that means driving them somewhere in our truck.
0930-Back at a very quiet and fairly clean house I settle in to the office for some time checking emails, catching up on bookkeeping, planning future menus and whatever else I need to do in the office.
1100-It’s time to head to town and try and get some banking done and bills paid. If I work it right, I’ll manage to do things before offices close for lunch…if not, it could be a slow day. On the days I don’t need to do banking, I’ll catch up on grocery shopping.
1400-I’m back at the house putting away the groceries, filing whatever documents I collected in town, and getting ready for the afternoon.
1500-I start preparing food for dinner. We’re feeding hoards, so it needs to be filling, reasonably healthy, and if possible not the same as what we ate already this week.
1630-A helper or two arrive to do final preparation of the evening meal while I sneak back into the office to complete whatever I didn’t complete earlier.
1730-Dinner is served to weary, hungry, sweaty team members who’ve spent the day doing their best to share Jesus’ love.
1900-Dishes are washed by the team members as I begin to wind down.
1930-I’m ready to go and hide for the remainder of the evening as the teams sit together and tell stories of their day.

Usually by the end of 6 weeks at this pace, I was rarely sad to see the teams depart. Though there is a lot of joy in hosting teams of life-filled young adults, it’s safe to say that the pace is tough.

My friend Armin once commented that “the extraordinary life seems ordinary to those living it,” and looking back on those Grace House days I think I’m justified in claiming the same for strenuous life. We often look at the life of others and feel that they are doing better at whatever metric we are measuring, and maybe they are. But when I look back at that season, I’m forced to realise that maybe I was trying to measure my strenuous life with the wrong scale.

How do you measure your life? Is it strenuous? Should that change?