by The Howitzer
I remember vividly one of the first times that I realized that I both loved and hated being employed. I was a college student and was home for my first summer break. One of the best jobs available for the transient worker was in the public school system. It paid pretty well and they were hiring college kids for the break. I really needed a job because I was putting myself through school and I was very thankful to be hired. In the summer, there was a lot of work to be done in maintaining and improving the schools. There were two classes of workers- the skilled and the unskilled. The skilled workers got to paint, do carpentry work and fix things. The unskilled like me got to mow grass. But even on the mowing crew there was a caste system. Some of the guys got to drive the tractor, some pushed mowers and some of us (me) got to strap on a gas operated weed-eater for 8 hrs a day. I think that is why I didn’t buy a weed-eater until I was 46 years old and even then I bought it for my wife because she wanted to weed-eat our yard.
Man’s relationship with work has always been a rocky one. If you go back to the early chapters of Genesis you find Adam being hired as a middle manager in Garden of Eden, Inc. His position focus sheet was to “cultivate and keep the Garden”. There was only one rule in the employee handbook: “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” We all know how the story goes from there, the headhunter comes along and begins to sow seeds of discontent with Adam and Eve and convinces them that they would be much better off if they just owned their own business. Besides the only thing standing between Adam and God was the knowledge that was contained in the fruit on that stupid tree. So, Adam breaks the one rule and promptly is presented with his walking papers.
One of challenges in his new gig is that from now on his work was going to be more difficult. Listen to how God describes his new working environment. “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you ; and you shall eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We don’t know how much this differs from his previous work situation in the garden. But suffice it to say that the grass was not greener in this case.
Adam’s choice has put us all in position to both love and hate our jobs. Because of our lineage connection to Adam, we all have an innate feeling that work is a God given blessing that we use to fill our days with meaning and take care of our families. In the same breath, we resent the SWEAT that it takes to eek out an existence and the time that it takes to make that happen. This is complicated by the fact that most of us are in subservient relationship with fallen men and women as employers and are surrounded with fellow-workers who can be challenging at times (to say the least). Add all that together and our lives as workers can be difficult.
Over the next few articles, I would like to lay out some observations that make our working lives tough to manage and how we can go about re-envisioning this area of our life to be a gift of God. Solomon put it this way, “I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one’s lifetime; moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor- it is the gift of God.” Stayed tuned as we examine the SWEAT of work and how to turn it into a good thing.
Photo by Abhijit Tembhekar
