Stewardship of Life

During the last half of my life I have afforded time to some study of finances related to taxing (a major concern for persons in Bible times as well as the present); for wage and status concerns (also appearing in Scripture); and, investing/savings (an issue that arises in Scripture and treated with some care in that the issue may become a wrong motive for obedience or disobedience to God).  The open secret of Scripture is that God seems to be on the side of the working stiff.  Working stiff was a popular title organized labor took for the common worker early in the turn to the 20th century, when many laborers organized focusing on poor conditions and wages.  Many of God’s commended servants were rather wealthy by the standards of the communities in which they lived.  They favored improvement for the common folk, but in a spirit of obvious and peaceful activism.  Job is noted as God’s person and enjoying both wealth and influence with the community.  After having worked through his ordeals his blessings from God offered twice the wealth and family success in later years.  God is not the enemy of wealth unless the wealthy hold both materialism and wrong attitudes about the tools of wealth.  I tend to believe that the Apostle Paul did rather well in his business as a tent maker.  By it he could refuse any salary for his ministry, although toward the end of ministry he did accept, in his ordeal as a persecuted and jailed apostle, gifts of sustenance from some of the churches.  In apostolic duty, as he grew older, he could not make and sell tents as in a former pattern.

Humanly speaking, a person has nothing to offer society except self (time) and labor (production) for which he or she is reimbursed, and ought to be paid sufficiently well to live with some comfort.  These common persons may suffer more from limitations to do assigned work than from rejection. Assuming that persons are willing to work, with assignments encompassing loyalties, emergencies, and attitudes among other factors, they are likely to gain job security, if employers survive economic changes.  There are other issues, principally found in the youthful recruits, related to ambition, incompetence, boredom and the like.  Persons may not find maturity to find fulfillment in the repetition of worthy tasks.  There are virtues won simply by doing the same tasks over and over so to gain respect for repetitive life, and the attitude in which persons may find a better way for performing job routines.  It is not the job that is boring, but the person doing the job that permits self to be bored or disillusioned.  In the meantime we can look for ways to compliment and appreciate those who perform the work that has less of what Scripture recognizes as human evaluation – honor and dishonor.  To be a wealthy owner is to honor, and to clean toilets is to dishonor – in human perception.  All this means nothing to God whose evaluations are on a different continuum.  This assumes maturity in the able person to work faithfully and well in any assignment.

We overcome the casual observation of jobs becoming honor or degradation by taking on God’s perception of work and mankind.  All jobs that address the needs of mankind are noble, and most are repetitive – perhaps to the point of boredom unless perceived in a service context.  Human beings are the ones that divide careers into honor and dishonor.  God counts them equal in service to his economy with mankind. He does not evaluate the human worth of a job, but the faithfulness in which individuals conduct themselves in completing the day’s tasks that rise and fall to the person.  My concern is not with the other person, but how well I performed, to the level of my potential, in the daily task of whatever sort to which my work assignment has fallen or risen to me.  God’s judgment begins and ends with faithfulness.  His evaluation of any person, prince or pauper will be made on the primary principle that the person be found faithful.  We know very little about Mary, the mother of Jesus, but we know she was faithful.  We know very little about her husband, Joseph, but we know he was found faithful.  The two were residents of a village with little reputation.  They became the parents of the most famous person in world history.  Luke 2:52 implies their excellence in their assignment – she as a wife/mother/servant in a righteous context, and he as a husband/father/servant in the same context.  The first duty of a student is to learn how to live faithfully to self and purpose, not to gain laps on the less educated, poor or victimized.  We learn to improve self-life.