One of my several mind games is related to wonder about how everything goes together in the mind of God. For example, what is the meaning of work? I refer to ordinary work, like daily chores and their status with God. When I read the Bible carefully I discover how important work is in the plan of God for human life. When I was a lad my mother assigned regular chores that included, for example, carrying out the water from the melting ice in the icebox. I didn’t really warm to the assignment, until one day I sensed that I was contributing to the good of the household. I was learning to work, as part of nurture. In time I worked at carrying newspapers, sold fruit in the streets, and caddied for golfers. I learned that the modest acts served the needs of persons, and were, in the passing, profitable to me in being able to pay for things I wanted in life. I went off to college, the first in my family history to do so. There the student was expected to give three hours a week gratis. There was no buy out. One year I washed dishes: another, I was the night watchman in that I was to go to certain points, turn the key in my recorder, and proceed to the next. This meant that the institution could gain an insurance coverage at a lower cost by sponsoring a monitoring service. In another college, my favorite job, among several there, was as the ice-cream maker, then the evening manager of the Stupe, hang-out for students, and the filler of the coal hoppers early each morning, including removal of the clinker ash of the night, in the college buildings.
I found in Scripture that concern in serving mankind complements God, who takes that service as done for him. Serving creation is serving God. Since he doesn’t need anything he has honored us by accepting the gesture of serving his creation as service to him. It offers meaning for mankind. So it was that he gave Moses instructions about some detail factors like the management of ordinary life. God in Scripture illustrated the matter further when he chose a young peasant girl, from a tiny village without reputation, to be married to a carpenter of limited skills. No celebrities there. The child born matured and became vitally important to the world. He took time out to have his staff serve fish sandwiches to a multitude, and clean up the site. He didn’t use miracle to replace work. It would send wrong (distracting) signals.
I learned, almost daily, that service to others made a better person of me. It qualified for the fact that persons are to serve persons, so to fulfill meaning as God wants to give it. We are separate units of one another. What honor there is for a mother changing the diaper of her child, or the father doing the same? What an honor to wipe (work) the nose of my boy, or listen (work) to his babbling, or teach (work) him to ride a bike. Do I teach him to work, to mow the lawn, so I don’t have to do it, or do I do it because he needs to sense his meaning to others of the tribe of family – so to serve the creator, partly through work? If I follow the latter, I have learned affirmative discipline, and have become a good parent – at least in this part of the larger context. It is a part of parenting, and no parent has done the job without teaching work.
In society work is attached to profit and wages, with self-pride. Where work is divided between dead end/repetitive, experience, and honored/creative experience, we lose personal maturation. We may also lose respect for humility, and acceptance of all persons. So we lose factors like: family solidarity, fiscal balance, proper behavior, and other positive factors. The result leads to spoiled kids, for excesses, for false pride, and the like. It is a spiritual matter to acknowledge and adapt humbly to work as God perceives work. Anything needed by mankind, no matter how modest the reputation for the context, is noble work. The emergence in America reducing respect for those who work at jobs related to sweat on the brow and dirt on the hands becomes something of irreverence to God and disrespect for people. Even a great leader ought to find the work of leading. God is likely to lay it on him in his grumbling about personal privilege. A man was brought to court for family abuse, and made it clear to the judge that even if his wife was at work, he would not change the diaper of his own child. He said he objected to the offense of human waste. An audience listening to him was aghast at his responses. His wife felt she was not loved and served, and was abused for her child. The man missed the divine/human experience of serving. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020