The What and The WayPete Greig - 17 Nov 2010

Welcome to one of the most wonderful and challenging times of year; a season of active waiting and preparation before Christmas which begins with ‘Stir Up Sunday’ this Sunday, 21st, (I’ll explain the name in a bit), followed by Thanksgiving in America on Thursday 25th and Advent Sunday throughout the Western church on the 28th November. The season of Advent is an invitation, an opportunity for spiritual intentionality, reflection and prayer in which you may like to renew disciplines such as daily bible study, physical exercise, journaling, reading a Christian book, running a season of 24-7 prayer, or arranging a ‘how am I doing?’ chat with a friend. All these things can help prepare space in the craziness of life for Christ to be born-again in you this Christmas.

The 24-7 community has been raised up to intercede about grave world issues like human trafficking and church decline, but also to pray more reflectively. Sometimes it’s as though God blows a whistle and tells us to stop saving the planet and attend to ourselves.

‘Search me,’ prays the Psalmist, ‘See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’ (Ps 139)

I was triggered to confront some difficult questions in myself recently through the sad, simple story of a man in his fifties who had been working so hard for so many years he’d become deep-soul tired. Weary to the bone. Health could no longer be taken for granted, and he felt indignant, entitled to take the whole of the rest of his life off. Within a year he’d sold up and moved to the West Country, determined to fulfil fantasies of golf on golden afternoons and leisurely breakfasts on the patio.

The first few weeks were busy and the next few heavenly. The third month was apparently idyllic and he wanted the world to know. But after nine months in paradise (and this is a true story told many times) the man found himself growing weary in a new and more worrying way. He discovered that pleasure became less pleasurable with daily repetition. Without the purpose and ardour of work, relaxation lost its appeal. As novelty became normal, gradually he felt himself aimlessly fading towards forgottenness.

Work-life balance

A marathon runner often, I’m told, hits a psychological wall around the 20 mile mark, when their lungs and muscles scream to stop and their brain insists that it’s impossible to keep going. The best response, however, is not to stop but to slow down because that way you continue to make progress and ultimately complete the race.

We all derive our sense of identity and wellbeing from the dual poles of achievement (making our mark in the world) and artistry by which we live meaningfully and well along the way. Life at its best is not a permanent holiday, but rather a delicate balance between the What (production) and the Way (process). When individuals, churches and organisations get this balance wrong – either by being enslaved to numbers or by lacking ambition - a part of their soul dies.

The unrestrained What drive leads to burn-out, while the over-indulged Way drive leads to aimlessness – a word we associate with despair. Recent research reveals that we are at our happiest whenever we are so immersed in a task that we aren’t thinking about whether or not we are happy.  That’s why sport and art and crossword puzzles will never go out of fashion. It’s also just one reason why so many British survivors of the Nazi Blitz bombings recall those as some of the happiest days of their lives. The scriptures insist that work is not something to be merely endured and eventually overcome, but rather that it is an aspect of our identity and eternal destiny. Thus the New Earth will perhaps be less like an eternal holiday destination and more like a fantastically fulfilling place in which purpose and peace combine. Philosopher Dallas Willard envisages humanity being ‘absorbed in a tremendously creative team effort, with unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity, with ever more comprehensive cycles of productivity and employment'.

We are today working 25% longer hours than we were 500 years ago and our productivity is 400% higher than it was in 1950. The UK has the longest working hours in Europe and North Americans have some of the longest working hours in the world. Christians are not immune from such pressures. As many as 1500 pastors leave church ministry in America every month – many of them are simply burnt-out. It is clear that unless we regularly stop and take stock, believers can become the busiest people on earth, squeezed somewhere between market forces, the Protestant Work ethic, interminable church programmes, our own moral perfectionism and excitement about being caught up in God’s purposes.

Thanksgiving and Advent therefore present an invaluable opportunity to stop and ask ourselves the big questions about what we’re achieving (too much, too little?) and the way we’re living as followers of Christ. Am I wasting my time, being lazy, un-strategic and burying the gifts God had given me? Or am I working so hard that I’m ignoring my family and treating colleagues as commodities and not ‘with the awe and circumspection proper to them’ as C.S. Lewis advocates? Is there sufficient space in my working week for reflection, relationship, exercise and other forms of recreation? Are the eternal demands of the urgent relentlessly robbing me of the important? Or are hurts and fears paralysing me from action? Am I being human or just doing human?

In some Anglican churches, this coming Sunday is known as ‘Stir Up Sunday’, a reference to the opening words of the collect for the day in the Book of Common Prayer which has reminded people since 1549 to work hard in God’s strength and also to enjoy the accompanying rewards along the way. It’s a perfect prayer with which to approach Advent, and to prepare ourselves for a little more heaven on earth this Christmas:
Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen