Many people think they don’t agree with the title to this post.
Some consider work something to avoid at all costs, while others merely find the prospect frustrating or distasteful.
I submit, for your consideration and ultimate (if grudging) approval, that all such people actually have it wrong.
I’ve spent the past couple of nights reading Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, which basically describes and relates the adventures of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance during their (failed) 1914-1916 expedition to cross the Antarctic continent by dogsled.
After the ship became trapped in (and later crushed by) pack ice during the winter of 1914, Shackleton and his men spent almost a year living on the Weddell Sea, struggling to reach the “safety” of open water and ultimately landing on deserted Elephant Island. Shackleton and a crew of six men set sail (open boat + the roaring twenties, I’m sure any mariners are jealous…) for civilization in an attempt to obtain a relief boat for the remaining members of the crew, who sat on Elephant Island and waited for rescue.
During their sojourn on the ice and on Elephant Island, the crew passed many days in which they literally had nothing to do but wait. Cooking food took little time, and the limitations of travel over the arctic ice and hideous weather conditions basically meant the men spent hours upon hours lying in their sleeping bags and waiting.
Excerpts from the sailors’ journals (as well as Shackleton’s logs) reveal an interesting fact: before the end of the journey, each and every man came to regret the lack of work and the long idle hours. One even states that although idleness would be boring even in London, with all the diversions society and civilization can offer, idleness in the cold, arctic winter is far worse, and not just because of the cold. That I’ll grant – but the first part of the sentence bears directly on today’s good thing – and it’s important to consider.
People who have work often don’t appreciate it as a blessing. Work causes stress. It makes us worry. It generates everything from concern about billable hours to fear that someone won’t appreciate our efforts (and might even call for a re-do, at 5pm on the day we promised to take the kids to the park). But in fact, work does much more than this.
Without work, and the opportunity to use our skills, we would have little ability to achieve or to improve. Even simple work provides us with the ability to gain satisfaction from a job well done. A million distasteful tasks – domestic and professional – still give us the ability to demonstrate fortitude, develop a variety of skills, and (if nothing else) prove we haven’t buried our literal or proverbial talents in the ground.
Work fills hours that otherwise might ultimately go idle, and no matter how attractive idleness may appear at 2:00 on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon, there’s really only so much idleness a person can take before the lack of work becomes a highly unpleasant burden.
God works. Start with Genesis 1.1 and keep reading – He worked long before He ever expected us to, and by the time you get to Deuteronomy 8 you might just recognize that He has continued to work – separate from but also alongside us – ever since. Little surprise, then, that people called to “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5.48, NASB) should not only work, but should look upon that work as a blessing and not a curse.
Work also provides an opportunity to forget (or at least put behind) more personal troubles in favor of a specific, and often communal, goal. The person who mourns but has no work to fill the hours can easily become consumed by grief, whereas the mourner who must work receives at least a temporary respite from personal problems. The sorrow may return at the end of the day, or even at periods throughout it, but at least some of the time the focus on work will displace individual suffering. At the end of the day, it’s all about you – but during the working hours, not so much.
I challenge those tempted to disagree to spend an entire day not working and still disagree that work offers more of a blessing than a curse. Careful, though: when I say don’t work, I mean Don’t Work At All. No gardening. No cooking. No sorting or mending or repairing. No construction of anything that lasts. No learning (which probably means no reading), no teaching, no observation of those who teach. Basically, that leaves watching grass grow, paint dry, or sitcoms on television.
And if you can make it through that day without rebelling or breaking the rules, you’ll likely end up bored to distraction.
Because even though we often don’t look at it as a blessing, and a sign of God’s favor, that’s really what work is: an opportunity to spend our time in constructive – if occasionally unpleasant – pursuits, to the greater good of our families, our friends, and the greater world at large.
And that, like it or not, is One Good Thing.
