Cursed Work!?
Posted by Tim on May 25, 2009
Have you ever gone through on of those periods in your life where it seems like all you do is work? I have been going through that for a while now. I am averaging 70+ hours a week between my two (and three and four) jobs.The thing that concerns me is that it is about to get worse. I am transitioning out of professional ministry and will need to hustle ever harder just to pay the bills. I guess this paragraph serves as my lame excuse for not blogging as much as I used to…
Needless to say, I am exhausted right now. When I get worn out like this, I usually start thinking really evil thoughts about at Adam and Eve. After all, if they hadn’t sinned, there would be no curse and I wouldn’t have to work. Before sin, Adam and Eve just hung out in the garden and did nothing, right? That is what I used to think but I am beginning to realize how wrong I am about this.
Recently I read Genesis again and saw some interesting things. I saw that Adam had work to do even before the curse. In 2:15 the Bible tells us that God “took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and guard and keep it.” Apparently even the Garden of Eden needed tending. I always pictured trees in perfect rows and nicely manicured (by God) grass. Maybe one of those cool mazes made out of hedges like you see in movies about England… But I guess Adam had to mow, pull weeds, and blaze trails himself. Whatever work it was, it wasn’t just sitting around picking and apple here and there when he got hungry.
Then God created all the animals and “brought them to Adam to see what he would call them” (2:19). How many hours of work would it take to name every kind of bird and animal in existance? Maybe he only had to come up with “dog” and not each breed of dog but that was still a lot of naming. And he was still responsible to keep that Garden straight. Can’t just let the place get overgrown while you spend a year or so coming up with names for animals. Adam was the first multi-tasker.
Even after creating Eve to help Adam with his loneliness problem (helper (2:18b) refers to the man being lonely (2:18a), not to his need for someone to do the dishes) God gave them jobs to do. In 1:28 (yes, I know chapter 1 comes before chapter 2 but God is addressing both of them so it must have happened after the stuff addressed to Adam alone) God says to them, “be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion…” While the first part of this sounds like a fun job, any parent will tell you that it involves at least 18 years of hard, stressful work to multiply. And subduing the earth and having dominion over it doesn’t sound like something I can do from the couch with the remote control…
All of these jobs were before the curse on the ground (3:17-19). My point is that while the curse made work harder, we were always meant to work. We were created to feel satisfaction from a job well done. We need to get rid of this idea that the ideal was to sit around naked in the garden and pick only as much fruit as it took to satiate our momentary hunger. We need to embrace our work and do it all as unto the Lord. We also need to understand that jobs like gardening, parenting, studying animals, and harnessing the power of this wonderful world God created are all holy callings. Yes, He calls some to preach but he also calls many more to do many different jobs. They are all holy unto the Lord. Do your work with passion. Do it to serve God, not your boss. Do your job with a thankful heart no matter how thankless your job is. You will not find fulfillment in avoiding work, but in embracing it. by “you” in the previous sentances, I mean “me.” I need to learn these things to keep myself from falling into the abyss of depression and burnout. I want to fully embrace my work but could I embrace just a litlle less of it fully? There is such a thing as balance after all, right?
