Her slow, second-grade reading let each stilted word land with its due weight in my heart. The child’s belabored oration of Proverbs 24 gave the much-needed words time to sink in; it’s a point worth belaboring:

“A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and want will come upon you like an armed man, and poverty like a robber.”

I took myself to be the only children’s ministry leader at church that night for whom the Scripture reading felt so apropos. Recent, personal experience led me to mentally supplement it with a selection from Ecclesiastes: “Through sloth the roof sinks in, and through indolence the house leaks.” 

Tomorrow’s Tomorrow

Before undertaking a dreaded house project (I can dread the slightest of them, it seems), I’ll sometimes spur on my resolve with a grim, drastic warning to myself: “Don’t go to hell.”

Please don’t dismiss it as crassness; if there’s a tendency in my soul that could drag me to colossal ruin, it’s sloth. It’s not one of the “deadly sins” without reason.

I see sloth taking up residence in a thousand little corners of my inner being, its evidences in my psyche betraying its presence: in the hit of relief I experience when I’m told a problem doesn’t require my immediate attention—in the twinge of fear I feel for that same instinctive, relieved response. 

I see it in the many dashed, self-foiled plans that dot the map of my past good intentions. For every obstacle that I was glad to have convinced myself was insurmountable and therefore not worth attempting, laziness triumphed.

Anything that can wait until “the day after tomorrow” lies waiting to ambush me; there’s peril in penultimate places. 

Anything that can wait until “the day after tomorrow” lies waiting to ambush me; there’s peril in penultimate places.

Just plain “tomorrow” is one thing, as the problem will be upon me in only one sleep. But anytime there’s that deadly buffer zone, that airlock of responsibility, a padding between future consequences and present-me… “A future version of me will have to deal with that problem, and it’s not even my future version of me. ‘The day after tomorrow?’ That’s future-me’s ‘future-me’ problem.”

Enter laziness. I see streams of online articles rushing to delete laziness’s existence entirely. And as one of the most undeniable and damning of human traits, there should be no wonder why we can’t tolerate “lazy” as a diagnosis. Laziness has no romantic angle. No tragic or empathetic spin can twist it into a glorious or even nobly-injured light. Laziness is just dumb. 

And yet, for all the unhealthy denial that could be wrapped up in our desire to extinguish the label of lazy, there is something to be said about why we get lazy. After all, people don’t start that way.

Case in point: if we had to learn to walk the first time as adults instead of as infants, how many average humans would have the tenacity and resolve to keep getting up, fall after fall? Not this author. Babies know nothing of laziness.

While it’s no more glorious, it’s at least a little more treatable when I can recognize my sloth as an empathy problem. I need look no further than the benefit-loss for the people closest to me to see my condition could be cured by simply caring enough about others. 

But we can look further. Laziness is also a future-self empathy problem. 

Laziness refuses to do unto future-me as I would have done unto my present self. Indolence takes what rightfully belongs to a version of me who ought to have as his inheritance the outcomes of earlier, responsible choices and squanders those opportunities on present-me instead.

Don’t Go to Hell

In sloth, I can’t see outside of myself—not even to a future self. In sloth, I’ll refuse to look to needs other than my own, make myself deaf to the suffering I cause, and become numb to the pain of those I should’ve cared for the most. 

If laziness is the path my personal road takes when I stray from the faithful way of love, then—for me—laziness is a path to hell. If slothful is how I become when my self-focused desires lead me away from love, then it’s at least not different than how hellishness can manifest in me.

With no necessity for tongues of flame or pitchforks, laziness paints me a picture of damnation: a soul self-focused, others-ignoring, empathy-unaware, and perpetually-suffering. My present laziness looks too much like hellfire for comfort. 

No one has to resign themselves to this. We can do hard things. Put more accurately: we can’t not do hard things. Laziness has a poor success rate of letting anyone off the hook easily.

We can’t *not* do hard things. Laziness has a poor success rate of letting anyone off the hook easily.

The mere fact that any walking adult is a person who struggled, risked, and fell repeatedly and vulnerably, just to learn to put one foot in front of the other, testifies that hard work is deep in our nature. 

The small girl who struggled to read Proverbs 24 will doubtless devour her first whole book soon—if she hasn’t already. Learning to read is no small task, but no one takes to it quite like a child can. 

I’m complicit in a plot with my Slothfulness against my future self. But somewhere inside and deep in my past is that childlike tenacity which, like childlike faith, might just be one of the saving graces I need to see the Kingdom of Heaven.