Ah, work! Given a choice, many of us would not work, at least not at the job in which we are engaged currently. On the other hand, given a choice to work at a job which we genuinely enjoy, we would probably not mind working. If we like what we do, we will not mind getting up to do it. And we will not always mind the time it may take away from other things we enjoy doing.
In the end, however, most, if not all of us, would like it if we did not need to work, if we did not need to get up each day to labor, if we did not need to insert ourselves into a tiresome world of competition, supervision, and activity simply to earn a living and pay our bills. We might enjoy a life of continuous and unrequitted leisure.
Or would we? Unless we are properly retired (and retirement is not an altogether undesirable experience), we, the human species, are made to work. From the very beginning, since the day that God set Adam in the garden and instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, people have worked. To work is to be human, and to be human is to work. Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully. It challenges us, involves us, enables us, fills us. Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
So why do so many of us dislike working? Unfortunately, once Adam and Eve plunged the world into a state of entropy and disrepair, the existential meaningfulness of everything their descendants (you and me) would do would not be as meaningful as it was originally intended to be. Though humanity continues to work, we do not find it to be as meaningful as it could be. It never completely satisfies.
Should we weep and wail over this? Perhaps, to a point. But we should also remember that regardless of what we do with our time in the workplace, we do so in the knowledge that, whatever we do, it has a point. God created it, God endowed it with meaning. We need to realize that however we may feel about our jobs, by doing them we, believe it or not, become most fully human. We come closer to becoming whom we are created to be: people who are meaningfully involved and purposefully enmeshed in this remarkable world, people who are gainfully and mightily contributing to the common history of humanity, people who are eloquently and passionately doing and communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all and, of most significance, to find more deeply what enables it all.
Thanks for working.
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