You Were Made to Go to Bed Tired
“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and his soul to see good in his toil.”
- Ecclesiastes 2:24
We live in a fine place with big mountains, rivers, ski trails, hiking trails and mostly better-than-average sports teams. Denver is a favorite destination for folks graduating college looking for some fun in their first years out of school. Its the place every company wants an office. A fairly regular pattern is for young 20-somethings to move to Denver, get a job, work a bit, play a lot and then when its time for life to get serious or kids come along to move somewhere else. We have one of the youngest cities in the country. We have one of the fittest cities in the country. We have one of the most single cities in the country. We also have one of the most sexually active cities in the country. In other words, most people aren’t living in Denver because of a love for building families here, or because of deep vocational ambitions. For the most part, you’ll find a fairly ambivalent attitude towards work and family here - after all, most people are from somewhere else and intend to eventually end up somewhere else.
All of this to say, one of the primary purposes of men and women is to be fruitful and Denver is not a place known for its fruitfulness. In the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes above, we eat and drink, but we don’t see much value in our toil - our fruitful labors. I think this stems from a few misconceptions about the nature of work, marriage and child-rearing that we should get busy rethinking along more biblical lines. The bible’s thinking on these things is richer than our current cultural confusion about these things.
Somewhere along the line we began to believe a few things about the nature of toil that has been confusing. Firstly we began to see work as merely paid work. A person’s value is to be measured by how much income they can generate or by how they can ascend the ladders of corporate America or how vibrant their entrepreneurial endeavors are. Home, marriage and children were at best, side-hustles and seen primarily as places or relationships of comfort. Our lives became increasingly siloed into work life and home life. They were placed in opposition to one another and began competing for our time and interest. Fruitfulness, if thought of at all was defined narrowly in terms of income or revenue generated. Additionally, work has been seen predominantly as a necessary evil. I work, build companies, build houses, or sell coffee because I need money for my home, or particularly in the singleness of a city like ours, simply to play more. We considered the goal of work to be play, perhaps a better future for our children, but largely centered on our own comfort and to support the lifestyle we wanted. I still remember as a school kid viewing each week as largely a long laborious affair to get to the weekend. I remember seeing the whole fall semester (at least once football season ended) as a journey to Christmas break and the point of a school year was summer break.
There are a number of problems with this, but I want to point out just a couple biblical correctives that I think would help us:
1 - The Bible doesn’t do a very good job of categorizing toil or our lives into neat categories. Building a home is labor. Raising children is labor. Planting a garden is labor. Cultivating a vibrant and God-honoring marriage is labor. And so is writing code, making coffee, practicing law or remodeling somebody else’s kitchen. There isn’t much in the way of instruction about the famed life-work balance. Rather we are given a whole bunch of work to give our lives to. Some of that work is exchanged for pay, a whole bunch of it isn’t. This guards against any sort of careerism or strange loyalties to companies wherein your employment evolves into a kind of familial replacement. God has made us to be fruitful. Our lives are to be marked by a full-orbed fruitfulness that demonstrates God’s faithfulness and blessing. And the kind of fruit produced in this life is varied and wonderful. Children are fruit. A happy marriage is fruit. A warm and hospitable home is fruit. Well-ordered spreadsheets and starting a good restaurant are both examples of fruitfulness. Society tends to measure fruit in terribly narrow ways, marking it primarily with pay or prestige. But the fruitfulness that God calls us to is far more copious and varied. And this varied and fruitful work is not some secondary addition to the meaning of your life, it is why you were made. (Ephesians 2:10 - For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works…”
2 - Work is no curse. A number of the difficulties we face are examples of the curse found in Genesis 3. But its important to see that the labor that goes into producing any meaningful fruit is not a curse. The work itself is a blessing. The fruit born by that work is a further blessing. And the generosity that sees that fruit serve others is a blessing as well. The 4th commandment mandates a weekly sabbath, but it also mandates 6 days of good work. This is no auxiliary command added on due to the necessity of sin. It is one of the fundamental ways we honor God and as such, it is one of the fundamental purposes for your existence. Sabbath rest, worship and play are days sanctified and an embodied confession of faith in the good provision of God. It is a day wherein we confess in worship and rest that this world is the Lord’s. And resting in that good confession we get to work on Monday, in offices, in cafes, and with dirty diapers and dinner-making. The eternal God has given us work to do, fruit to grow, and his blessing on this work and this fruit is necessary. So we work and we rest and we play and we go to bed tired.
3 - Tiredness isn’t often heralded as a gift, but it is. When you look about your life you should see an absolutely endless supply of good, fruitful work to be done. You were designed to wake early, get to work on all that fruitfulness and then to go to bed at the end of each day happy and tired. Tired, because God has blessed you with much fruit to be busy with. Happy, because no matter the circumstances of that good labor, God has promised that in him none of it will go to waste. We labor as men and women created for it. We rejoice as men and women for whom God is at work. So eat and drink and see the good in your toil and smile as you lay exhausted in your bed.
“Therefore my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
- 1 Corinthians 15:58