Six Days Shalt Thou Labor - The Discipline of Work

The last of my musings inspired by Elisabeth Elliot's Discipline.

We had just returned from a week spent visiting friends and family.  There was a mountain of laundry in the basement.  The kitchen cabinets were sticky, and the floor needed to be mopped.  My husband returned to work.  The kids were restless, and so was I.  My sadness over leaving loved ones bred bitterness and discontent.  I felt both overwhelmed by and dissatisfied with my calling to be wife, mom, and homemaker.

The cure for my ungrateful, sinful attitude?  First prayer.  Then work.

Also, I re-read a book that my neighbor had just returned, the brief The Fruit of Her Hands by Nancy Wilson.  “It’s a book my sister and I say we should read annually,” I had told her.  Angie agreed.  But I hadn’t read it in more than a year, so I picked it up again. 

In it Nancy also struggles with her work:

I was occupied with many mundane things like diapers and laundry and crayons and play dough…One night as I was washing the dishes [I wondered] Shouldn’t I be leading Bible studies?  Shouldn’t I be involved in more active evangelism?  Couldn’t I ‘disciple’ someone?  Didn’t God want me to do something for Him?

Immediately I realized what He wanted me to do.  He wanted me to do the dishes.  But I still wondered if there was something else He wanted me to do.  And I realized that, yes, there was something else.  He wanted me to do them cheerfully.

As I reflected on this I realized what I had known all along.  God had called me to be a wife, mother, and homemaker.  Because of this, all the mundane things I did were sanctified, holy, purposeful, and honoring to God…  ‘I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service’ (Rom. 12:1).  Not only that, I should also find contentment and satisfaction in knowing I was doing these things unto the Lord.

Contrary to common assumption, work is not a result of the Fall.  God created Adam and placed him in the garden to “dress it” and to “keep it.”  To work.  It’s true that since the Fall our work is especially difficult.  As a result of their sin, God declared that in sorrow the woman would bring forth children and in sorrow and in the sweat of his face the man would eat bread.  But work itself was not the punishment.  Our God is a working God, and He wills that we also work.

In 2 Thessalonians 3 Paul commands the saints in Thessalonica to separate themselves from a brother who is “walking disorderly.”  What is the sin of that man?  His refusal to work.  “For even when we were with you,” Paul writes, “this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

The Reformer Martin Luther was the first to use the word “vocation” to refer to work that was not specifically religious.  He taught that not only the work of the clergyman or the theologian, but also the work of the ditch-digger and the mother, when done heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, constituted worship (Col. 3:23). 

What is your vocation?  “Essentially, one's vocation is to be found in the place one occupies in the present. A person stuck in a dead-end job may have higher ambitions, but for the moment, that job, however humble, is one's vocation…Vocations are also multiple. Any given person has many vocations. A typical man might be, simultaneously, a husband,  a father, a son, an employer, an employee, a citizen… (Gene E. Vieth, The Doctrine of Vocation).

Work is the means God uses to provide for us physically and spiritually.  We are tempted on one hand to disdain this means.  So the lotteries thrive, and the welfare system swells.  So everyone is out to win the raffle or make a “quick buck.”  On the other hand there is the temptation to make work itself a god.  We are, as John Calvin wrote, idol factories, constantly giving our loyalty to things other than God. We must remember that work is only the means; God is still the provider.  Those who are tempted to make work their idol must ask themselves if they are neglecting their other vocations: those of father, husband, etc. 

  Idleness is the devil’s workshop, but “the sleep of a laboring man is sweet,” and that “whether he eat little or much” (Ecclesiastes 5:12).  Are you feeling discontent today?  Listless, or dissatisfied with your vocation?  Perhaps it’s time to stoop in prayer.  Perhaps it’s time to get on your knees and mop the floor.