Let's Get to Work!

There once was a little boy at my house.  Now he’s twenty years old and 6’5” and is only at my house occasionally, but there really was a time when he was a little dude.  Way back then, his grandparents gave him this really cool toy John Deere tractor.  When you pushed down on top of the cab, it made a noise like a tractor engine starting up and this little mechanical voice said, “Let’s get to work!”  I think I actually had more fun playing with it than he did, but we won’t go into that.

“Let’s get to work!”  How compelling is that phrase?  I guess it depends on the nature of the work.  If it’s something we initiated, it can be invigorating.  If it’s something we believe to be valuable, we may have a sense of accomplishment.  If it’s something for which we have a sense of calling, we may even be passionate about it.  In a future post, I plan to write about how our perspective on work can open us up to new adventures, but for today I want to focus on the risk of having too much time on our hands.

Now, I like my “down time” as much as anyone.  I love traveling, reading, playing music, watching TV, hanging out with family.  I like being able to leave the office and feel like I am done for the day.  And I love weekends!  But I also have plenty to do.  When our youngest went off to college and the nest was empty, people asked us how we were handling it.  They knew how involved we always were in our kids’ lives.  The truth is that we are so busy now that we don’t know how we ever managed to get to all their activities.  We find things we enjoy and things that we believe in and we throw ourselves into them.

Would you like to know a secret benefit of that?  I hope you would, otherwise you have already stopped reading.  The secret benefit is that we are so busy with the things that matter to us that we really don’t have time to criticize—or even pay much attention to—what anyone else is doing or not doing.  We are focused on the responsibilities and opportunities before us.

Now, I have spent my adult life mostly interacting with “church people”.  For some strange reason, I have this crazy idea that those who have found grace, forgiveness, and purpose ought to be the most joyful and least critical.  And then I hear some of the critiques from both laity and clergy, male and female, young and old.  And do you know what I have noticed on a fairly consistent basis?  Those who complain the loudest tend to be those who are doing the least.  From that observation I have come to a solid conclusion:  People who are busy in the work of the kingdom of God usually just don’t have time to be busybodies.

I love this translation of James 1:22-25 from The Message – “Don't fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don't act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like. But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God — the free life! — even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action. “

So, because our lives matter to God and because there is so much to do that matters … let’s get to work!  It’s good for what ails us.