A friend recently confided to me, “If there’s one thing I could go back and change, I wish I had not worked so much.” His statement didn’t surprise me. Probably because I’ve heard those exact words uttered multiple times, almost always from older men who, like my friend, were successful in their career fields. Their next statement is usually this: “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”
As human beings—especially as human beings who live and work in America—why do we struggle to have a healthy relationship with our work? Volumes of books and articles have been written about how to be successful in one’s chosen career. Then follow-up volumes are written on how to find a healthy work-life balance because many become overly obsessed with their career. In recent years, there’s been another twist—the FIRE movement, or Financial Independence, Retire Early. The goal being to save hard and fast and stop working completely, preferably in one’s 30s or 40s. But keep digging and you’ll find still more articles written by those who achieved early retirement only to find themselves feeling lost, adrift in life without a career to anchor them, sometimes even falling into depression.
This topic applies to the pastorate as much as any other occupation. Pastors are notorious for working too much. I get why. As a pastor, there’s not only a never-ending list of things you must do (sermon prep, emails, elder meeting agendas, counseling etc.), there’s also those nagging items you should do (finish that article, invite that person to coffee, attend a leadership webinar, read more…the list goes on and on). Then there’s the temptation to idolize ministry and prioritize ministry tasks over…well, everything. Whatever the motive, it’s easy to slip into chronic over-working. How do we avoid this ugly fate?
When that happens, work doesn’t retain its rightful position as a vital and potentially wonderful part of our lives. Rather, it becomes the glue that seemingly holds life together.
Having a healthy relationship with our work begins, I think, with forming correct expectations of work. Fortunately, we don’t have to formulate these expectations on our own. We need only to look as far as one of my absolute favorite books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes contains wisdom for every season of life. In it we find an Israelite king who calls himself “the Teacher” conducting a series of life experiments, testing things like pleasure, achievement and wealth. Why is the Teacher performing these tests? Because he wants to discover if there is any human activity that will resolve the mysterious, oftentimes tumultuous nature of life on this earth and allow him to live a satisfying life. So, the Teacher lines up a series of candidates and gives each of them a whirl.
He begins by testing work. In Ecclesiastes 2:4-9 the Teacher throws himself into the labor of a king. He constructs great buildings and parks, he harnesses the natural resources of his land, he stokes the economy and amasses wealth for himself and his country. The result is that, through his work, he becomes greater and more powerful than any king before him.
Then the Teacher surveys the results of his labor and gives seemingly contradictory conclusions. He says, “my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward…” (Eccl 2:10). But then, “Yet when I surveyed…what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Eccl 2:11). How can work be pleasurable yet meaningless at the same time?
Let’s start with 2:10. Why is toil pleasurable? The answer is because we as human beings need to work. Not just to earn money but because we need work. We actually become physically and mentally unhealthy if we wake up day after day and have nothing to do. That’s why millennials retiring in their 30s struggle to adjust. So yes, working hard and creating something of value is pleasurable; it satisfies that inherent human need God placed in our makeup to work and work hard.
Now 2:11. Here the Teacher says that all his labor was ultimately unfulfilling and meaningless. Remember the experiment—the Teacher isn’t just trying to be good at his job. He is testing work. He is testing whether he can successfully ground his identity and self-worth and find his purpose for living in his work. And work fails the test.
Consider carefully what the Teacher is teaching. Instead of deriving healthy satisfaction from a job well-done, it is so easy to make a subtle shift and attempt to find our identity and self-worth in our occupation. When that happens, work doesn’t retain its rightful position as a vital and potentially wonderful part of our lives. Rather, it becomes the glue that seemingly holds life together. And that, as the Teacher discovered, is where the trouble occurs.
So, as pastors, what should be our expectations of work? That work is good. We need it. It is a gift. But work, even working in ministry, cannot become the center of our lives. It cannot become the source of our identity, meaning or purpose. If we look to ministry for these things, we are going to run into problems.
Let’s not end up having to tell younger pastors, “Don’t make the same mistake I did.” Rather, let’s enjoy the many good things the pastoral vocation has to offer, but center our lives where they ought to be centered, on God alone.
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A variation of this post was published in Fellowship Focus, July/August 2020. Used with permission.
