Читать книгу Work. The purpose and blessing of your daily labor - Маттс-Ола Исхоел - Страница 2

It is 04.30 in the morning and I am sound asleep. The first alarm clock goes off and fills the room with an aggressive chiming. I am 16 years old and still in school, so it is before the age of smart phones that can be set with smooth melodies. Here there are no smooth sounds, only old-fashioned chiming bells. The ringing has, however, little effect on me. Hardly noticing the noise, I reach for the clock and turn it off. But when I set the alarm the evening before, I was smart enough to know that one clock wouldn’t do it. One by one, there are others coming.

One could be hidden under the bed, another in my closet. And since I have to spend time not only turning the alarms off, but also searching for them, I slowly wake up and realize what I have to do. I need to get dressed and go down to the town center, to the newspaper office, and pick up a sack of today’s edition. I will spend the following hours delivering newspapers, no matter the day of the week, the weather or how tired I am.

Everyone in the family is sleeping, and so are all my friends from school. But I can’t rest until I have delivered every last paper. If I am lucky, I could get another 30 minutes of sleep before school begins, but many mornings I have to show up at the first lesson with a body longing to go back to bed.

There is of course a reward for this – once a month I will get a pay check. Not much, but enough for me to have more pocket money than my friends.

What can seem a little odd about all this is that I am a Christian, and believe in a God who created the world in six days. He can do anything. He created both gold and silver, and if He can turn water into wine, He should also be able to turn a handful of earth into a Big Mac. So why do I need to go through this? Why these daily clashes with the alarm clocks? Why can’t God let me find some money by the wayside on my way to school so I can sleep till 7 am like everyone else? Since I am the son of a Baptist pastor, that does not seem unreasonable.

But in fact, in God’s eyes it is unreasonable. Man is indeed created to admire, to love, to rest and to worship. But he is also created to work. What all of us who work have in common is that we are a part of God’s order for this world. To work, to learn, to be creative, to complete a mission – are all part of what it is to be human. God did not create man to simply sit in a garden and smell flowers, he also made him to carry responsibility and be productive.

Although work can be exhausting and sometimes even agonizing, as Christians we should have a fundamentally positive attitude regarding work. God is the ultimate provider of all things, and He wants to be your strength, joy and wisdom in whatever profession you have. There are biblical principles He wants you to discover, principles that will give meaning and bring blessing to your daily labor.

So even though my battles with the alarm clocks were sometimes fierce, they were never in vain. And in this book I want to tell you why.