Bright Spot: My Father is always at work, but I should join him
How many of us had dads who were always working? That is a major theme of many movies, and lives, today. This includes the classics “Peter Pan” with Robin Williams, “Mary Poppins” with Julie Andrews and a multitude more.
My own father was 8 years old when his father died. He and his older brothers had to go to work early to help support his five siblings and mom. It was the height of the depression with no social safety nets like welfare, food stamps, Medicare/Medicaid or Social Security. The strong three-legged stool of family, church and community stepped in and stepped up to get folks through, most of the time better than the programs above. Everybody worked a lot in those days.
Social scientists have been promising for years that we’d be working fewer hours in the future that never comes. This was the hope automation and computers held out. Now AI promises even more. Maybe even more than we want. Or more over-promising and under-delivering ahead?
“The norm of working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people every year.” That's according to the World Health Organization, which warned Monday, that longer working hours is a worsening trend that may have intensified during the pandemic.
In the first global study associated with longer working hours around 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours. W.H.O. technical officer Frank Pega explains: ‘We have some evidence that shows that when countries go into national lock-down, the number of hours worked increases by about 10 percent.’”
The digitization of work happened long before COVID-19, when people seemingly could never disconnect from work long after quitting time due to laptops, cell phones, emails, and texts, even on so-called vacations.
The W.H.O. recommended the need for capping work hours to increase worker productivity and protect workers' health.
I know I put in too many hours in my working years, sometimes for the right reasons and sometimes not. My kids have forgiven me and I’m on the way to forgiving myself. I know Jesus has.
Can you relate?
Jesus appears to relate in these verses: “My Father is always at his work … and I too am working [like Father, like son] … The Son can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” (John 5:17)
The point of those verses is not to say God and Jesus had no work boundaries. No. If we want to be effective and in God’s will we should try to see where God is at work and join Him in that. Then whether we work long or short, we’ll know we’re involved in something life-giving and life-changing: “Just as the Father … [and] the Son gives life to all he is pleased to give it.” Life-giving is their work, and as we join them, it becomes ours.
Rick Sams is pastor emeritus of Alliance Friends Church.
This article originally appeared on The Alliance Review: Bright Spot: My Father is always at work, but I should join him
