Tired

August 12, 2019

“Work as if everything depended on you; pray as if everything depended on God.” I don’t know where or when I first heard that maxim, but it’s been with me a long time. It’s a spin-off of the old Protestant work ethic, which was drilled into me from childhood. “There’s no play until the work is done” was something I heard regularly when I was growing up. There is value in this perspective. We live in a culture increasingly enamored with entitlement, something my forebears would have found abhorrent. One just didn’t ask others for help; it would be better to go without than to go begging.

There’s a part of me that needed that prodding. At heart, I am quite lazy, and have no trouble frittering time away on useless endeavors or no endeavors at all. My father’s voice ringing in my head is a constant encouragement to get busy and get the job done. I’ve at times however, found it somewhat of a slave driver. As pastor, there was always more work; the job was never done. Even in retirement (“What is that?” I say), there is one more person to see, one more sermon to write. And home ownership keeps us hopping. When I got home from work this afternoon, there was waiting for me some village business followed by raking the chips and twigs from the back yard, finally putting to rest the trees we had cut last week. The lawn needs trimming around the edges, but this time it was me who ran out of gas, not the mower.

I know very little of exhausting, soul-sapping work. For thousands of years, most of mankind labored from sunrise to sunset just to live at a subsistence level. Slaves often literally worked themselves to death, and even today the scourge of human trafficking extracts a horrific price from those so unfortunate as to be entrapped in its evil grip. For these, fitful sleep is periodic relief, and death is a welcome release. 

Tonight I am tired, but I am free. I will safely rest in a comfortable bed, untroubled by worry and fear. I expect to wake tomorrow knowing that already I have been blessed with a longer and better life than most, so I am thankful for all I’ve been given, and will hear that prodding once more, reminding me that there’s work to be done before it’s time to play. I’ll work, but I’ll also pray, knowing that apart from the blessing of my Heavenly Father, the work is as the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “vanity,” but with that blessing, it has meaning and purpose in the greater counsel of God.