THE BLESSING OF WORK

". . .cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. . .In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (Genesis 3:17&19).

"Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest labor with his hands, so that he may have something to give to those in need" (Ephesians 4:28).

"For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: 'If any one will not work, let him not eat'" (2 Thessalonians 3:10).


"They all worked until they died. That after all is the final test of the degree of interest in one's work. Professor Hans Virchow once said to me while I was laboring with an exasperating lymph-vessal injection: 'He who has never shed tears over his work does not know what it is to try'" (Dr. Arthur E. Hertzler speaking of his professors in medical school in Berlin, Germany. Hertzler practiced medicine on the Kansas frontier in the 19th and early 20th centuries.).

"A friend once found De Condoyle the great anthropologist hard at work late at night. This friend remarked that he must love his science to be working so late--the professor was then eighty years of age. 'No,' replied the old scientist; 'it is not love of science that drives me. It is to drown my grief'"(Dr. Arthur E. Hetzler).


The necessity of work is reality. The nobility of work is determined by the attitude that is brought to it. Indeed, many work harder at avoiding work than actually doing the tasks that are required of them to do because the tasks are unpleasant and disagreeable to them. I have seen active people busily avoiding the real work that needed to be done. It should be noted that work did not become toilsome and tedious until sin entered the world. It is our sinful attitudes that contribute the most to making our work seem unpleasant. Certainly, painful physical conditions play their part in all this, but they can be battled through if one views her work as a high-calling.
And, even very lowly work is a high-calling if it is done for the Lord. There is no honest work that is demeaning!

Every human being has three needs which must be met or he or she will have problems. These needs are: to love, to be loved and to do something worthwhile. That there is a considerable amount of over-lap between loving and doing something worthwhile is admitted, but try living life without doing something worthwhile and you set yourself up for a major loss of self-esteem and the addition of some diagnosable mental health disorder. People feel better about themselves if they do honest labor; they are not only blessing themselves, but those around them too.

One of the blessings of work is that it is a distraction from heart-ache and grief. Grief never goes away until we make it to heaven and Jesus wipes every tear from our eyes. But, four things help us to bear our grief on this earth: our Faith, the fellowship of our friends and family, our tears and our work. Sweating-hard work offers a respite from the gnawing pain of grief and loss. Too much time alone in introspection increases the pain, making it much harder to bear.

So, thank God that you have work to do and get to it!

Grace&Peace,
Tom