Work. Rest. Play.Part One: Work

A couple of stories I read and heard a couple of weeks back got me thinking about the logical rhythm of life we were created to live as opposed to the contrived, distorted and perhaps more artificial version to which we've adapted in our third millennium convalescence.

The first story I heard was about the prevalence of diabetes due to poor diet. Effectively, obesity-induced bad health.

The second was the effective treatment of severe depression amongst middle-aged men.

And the third was the treatment of the most appropriate treatment for women enduring the effects of menopause in their middle-age.

Each of these stories were utterly independent of each other yet, perhaps predictably to some, the treatment for the relief, reduction, or apprehension of these conditions was the same: exercise. In fact, in the case of the depressed cohort, exercise outperformed the most effective drug by quite a margin.

It got me thinking about the nature of our lifestyle in 2007 versus God's original intention for us. Before I wind back the clock and get all agrarian on you, I just want to talk about pattern and rhythm. Largely because what we've done, through great, convenient, time-saving, life-giving advancements, is create an environment that allows us to ignore the work, rest, play rhythms of life.

Where do I start?

Let's start with this: work is good. A hard day's work is good. And a hard day's labour is great. God followed a 6 day on, 1 day off pattern and it worked pretty well for him. The creation story tells of no plant having sprung up in the field because man wasn't yet available to work the soil. The concept of work is pre-fall. That's to say: it's consistent with a humanity fully restored to its creator. Genesis 2 reads: The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

This is one of the 538 references to work in the NIV. Admittedly not all of them are in the context of work that I'm talking here, but you can bet that a whole bunch of them are.

When a gaggle of slackers in the church at Thessalonica (I can't come up with a better collective noun for slackers than gaggle on the fly) decide that Jesus is coming soon so they best give up their day jobs and wait for the rapture, Paul rains on their tedious parade and says: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat." Paul was a bit of a worker too.

Solomon was also partial to a little work. He has the Proverbs 31 woman pretty much running the universe on her own and throws out a stern rebuke or warning to the idle in Proverbs 6 with this little gem: A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man.

I don't really need advocates for the idea of work though, I just need a little more justification for the benefits. This is where it will get a little tough to keep the 3 parts of the Mars Bar separate. And that's appropriate, because from get-go God has been all about integration. The idea that work, rest and play should be connected and overlap is a little obvious. For the sake of a three-part strategy though, let's try and contain this post to work.

While I'm no medical practitioner (not even a closet one) I reckon the reason behind exercise being a solutions to a multitude of maladies has a whole lot to do with endorphins. Endorphins are a by-product of hard labour. And they make you feel good. They have an analgaesic effect Prolonged physical exercise will do it for you although a bunch of scientists have hypothesised that the high comes comes as much from completing a challenge as it does from exertion. Either way, it works for me. Through their analgesic effect on the body, the release of endorphins results in a state of euphoria for the satisfied receiver.

So here's what I'm thinking: in the rhythm of life that we were created to enjoy, our work was part of the healthy mind/healthy body balance. While my work is largely sedentary and needs to be supplemented with exercise to attain this balance, the rhythm of life back in the day would have yielded a bunch of endorphins each day. Dad went off to work and worked hard. Dad was fit. Dad ate plenty because he was hungry from a hard day's work. But he was also blimmin' satisfied in his labour. The endorphins released by his effort and accomplishments made sure of it.

Obviously it's not all about work. For a start that wouldn't make for a trinity of posts. And it would eventualy make Jack a dull boy—though perhaps not as quickly as all play and no work would.

I've got to stop as my body clock is calling for the second installment of the series right now.

Before I go though, what's your experience of work? Does it energise you? Reward you? If you're in an active job, do you come home tired and satisfied...or just plain tired. And how is it linked to your spirituality and your relationships. Is it connected or is it separate? How do you address the sedentary nature of your job with a body that craves endorphins for its own sanity?