Work is a Gift

"Work is a gift, a vocation. Before the Fall, Adam was given the garden to cultivate. It was only after the Fall that all nature travailed and groaned so that man has to work with the sweat of his brow and combat earthquakes, floods, droughts, boll weevils, Japanese beetles, fatigue and sloth." Dorothy Day

Did you see how she included fatigue and sloth in there amongst all these awesome things like boll weevils? What a truly profound thought - 'Work is a gift.' Something about this hit me right. Adam was gifted with the opportunity to work to tend and care for the garden. I don't think many people today (at least the ones I go to work with) consider the work part of their work a gift. Most are happy with the wage part though. But 'Work is a gift' isn't a philosophy that ends when we say we are thankful for a job because it can pay the bills and its hard to get a job that does so. 'Work is a gift' is to say - I am thankful that you trusted me to be a steward of something Lord - that you have filled me with talent such that I have responsibility.

I've been trying to think about whether or not work and rest are opposites. I think generally we consider them so. I desire to REST in the heart of God more than anything else. Is part of that feeling that I get imagining that the idea that the 'work' of this life will be over - that grasping and seeking work. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the error in my thinking in that sentence is in my definition of work - or my automatic association of it to that which is longing and unfulfilled in life. I'm thinking maybe that rest isn't the opposite of work. This morning I fixed the dishwasher and leveled out the oven with my dad. I can confess that I didn't do much of the work, but I was still focused on the task and trying to help and it was incredibly restful. Work can be restful no? Rest, in the way I am thinking of it here, is more a state of the heart than a horizontal position. Does it make sense that if one considers work a gift than one can rest in the thought that someone out there thought enough of the person to bless them with it.

I think we can also turn work into a frustrating annoying thing. I had to 'work' today on an assignment that I thought was bogus and unnecessary - and it somewhat soured my rested mood from the morning. So much so that I had to try and talk less, because it was one of those situations where you could tell that your quick thoughts and words weren't rational, let alone compassionate. Was it simply the struggle with that frustrating 'work' that pushed out my rest? Maybe. Maybe it was my attitude towards it. This wasn't destructive work, and in fact it was probably training me in more ways than I thought. Could it be possible that I just didn't have the right attitude about it? This kind of seems like a big jump - but I was thinking abou this other passage of Day's and considered that maybe I was a bit short-sighted about what I had to do. If i considered that work part of the work fo the Kingdom, in that even the discipline was most likely training me, then I could see it still as a gift. The amazing opportunity God has given me to work in this life to begin to build his Kingdom. The Kingdom he will return and finish, the Earth he will renew and restore!

"There is work now. Much of our national expenditure by the government is for war, past and present. Much of this work, this labor, is not good work, constructive work, but work for preparedness, or dealing with pensions or hospitals, etc. It is not even in building homes that have been destroyed by war, let alone homes here in this country where we did not have that destruction. Slums are still with us. Many houses have been torn down, more than hvae been put up. Farms have been consolidated and produce less than if they were all small farms; soil has been depleted, national resources have been wasted. And are we to sit by and see man, and God's good earth, so ruined and degraded, and then be told, "Do not bother bout these things, seek first the kingdom of haven?" Dorothy Day

The truth is, and please let me know if you agree that this is the case, I may have romanticized the work I did today. Trying to get to some kind of a place where I can consider it a gift. But Lord-willing that will lead me towards constructive Kingdom work - where I see that the seeking of God's will intersects with work on the Earth. Another note I want to make is that I don't want to carelessly dismiss the idea of struggling through work. We often talk about 'heart work' which can involve difficult, emotional, and slow growth and change. I do not want to disregard the struggle that that involves and just say that it is all gift and rest. But I do want to throw the thought out there.