Being About
“What do you do?”
It’s a question I hate to answer, and I know it’s coming every time I am introduced to someone new. It’s not that I cannot answer it, but I know what’s coming next after I say that we own a family business. “What is your business?” invariably follows.
Because we operate several businesses in different markets, to fully answer that question requires a lot of explanation. But I know that a complete answer: 1. Is much more than anyone really wants to hear, 2. Is terribly boring to most people, and 3. Makes it seem that I think what we do is important. In the total scheme of things, it is not. So, for years I’ve honed my answer to be just concise enough to not seem evasive.
When I think about it now, it seems that for all these years I might not have understood what people really wanted to know. Not sure.
Is it just odd, or is it for extreme emphasis that there is only one thing recorded that Jesus said before His baptism by John the Baptist and the beginning of His ministry? I find only one bit of conversation that has been preserved for us from His first thirty or so years. How significant must that be?
Jesus was only twelve years old when Mary and Joseph realized that He wasn’t with them as they were returning from Jerusalem. When they found Him in the temple and asked what he was doing, He replied: “Did you not know that I must be about My Father’s business?” Luke 2:49 NKJV
One clear statement out of thirty years! “I must be about My Father’s business.” Wow! If I am to be a true follower of Christ, can I primarily “be about” anything else?
And what meaning does this “about” have for me? Was Jesus saying that He must be moving “about” accomplishing The Father’s will for Him?
Or is the meaning of “about” more like that of a story? What is the story “about”? What is its essence? What is its meaning? Was Jesus saying that His essence, His being was and must be The Father’s will? Is that not what we must also be about?
Even secular writers understand this concept. Seals and Crofts sang about it in their “Diamond Girl”. Could we say this about our Heavenly Father?
“How could I shine without you, when it’s about you that I am.”
These days I find myself under deep conviction that for the last fifty years I have mostly been about Skip’s business. Have I just been finding small spaces to fit God’s business in among Skip’s business?
Doesn’t where I spend my time, my physical and mental energy, my resources show exactly whose business I am about? Can a seventy year old man change what he is primarily “about”? I’m hoping so…and believing in the promise:
“being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ;”
Philippians 1:6 NKJV
“What do you do?”
“Whose business are you about?”
