“For My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts, Neither Are Your Ways My Ways”
I think God cares more about relationships than about the grind.
This past week I took my first full weekend off all year.
It felt incredible.
This year I’ve been letting work seep into Saturdays and even Sundays. As I added going back to school to become a prison chaplain to my plate, the situation got worse. I was loving everything I was doing, but I was also skipping date nights and working straight until 5pm some Saturdays.
Over the past couple of weeks, I felt like God was telling me: No more. Every time I opened the Bible, I would find myself reading about the importance of the Sabbath. The topic of the Sabbath came up as a discussion in my small group. On a call with my spiritual director last week, I felt God inviting me to close my laptop on Friday night and not open it again until Monday morning.
So I did. And a weekend without work was wonderful. My wife and I got to plan a great celebration for her mother. We also reconnected, and with the benefit of time to actually connect, she was able to tell me how frustrating it had been this year to feel like I put work and school so consistently ahead of our relationship. That was a hard conversation for us to have, but it felt important.
This week, I’ve been trying to do things differently.
I still got my work done. But I also made time each day for breaks to hang out with my wife, whether that meant hearing about her day or just taking our dog for a walk together. I set a firm rule that I wouldn’t work past 6pm on our date nights. I’m writing this piece on Friday night, but after I schedule it, I’m going to close my computer and not look at work again until Monday morning.
Partly, I made these changes because I love my wife and I want to make sure that she knows she’s a priority in my life. But I also felt a sense of what Saint Ignatius calls “consolation” (essentially, the love, peace, joy, and connection that rises in our hearts when what we’re doing is bringing us closer to God) every time I took a break from work to spend time with my family. For the first time in months, I feel like I’m living the life that God has always intended for me.
To be clear, I love my work, and I’m not planning on slowing down too too much. I think that good work can be a powerful way for us to live into God’s calling in our own lives.
But I also think there’s something foundationally wrong with how we think about work in the United States. We worship the grind. We talk about building our empires. We answer texts and calls from work 6-7 days per week. In a lot of circles, we try to one-up each other by talking about how insanely busy we are.
Best case, I think we can get so focused on a career that lights us up that we end up neglecting other aspects of our lives. Worst case, we sacrifice our time and our relationships in the empty hope that the corner office or a higher paycheck will finally make us happy.
I think God has something better in mind for us.
It all reminds me of that oft-quoted Bible verse, Isaiah 55:8: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (NIV). That verse gets thrown around a lot, probably in some ways that are more helpful than others, but lately I’ve been thinking about it especially in the context of values. In the United States, we prioritize working hard and being busy above pretty much anything else. But I don’t think that’s God’s way. I think that God cares a lot more about the quality of our relationships than He does about how much time we’ve spent in the office.
None of us are going to get to our death beds and wish that we’d spent more time working. Probably, our regrets (if we have them) will be around relationships and missed opportunities: we’ll wish we had caught our kid’s Little League game, or that we’d gone on an extra vacation with our spouse, or that we’d made more time for our parents or siblings. I think our regret over missing those things is another sign that they’re a lot closer to God’s heart than how much money we make.
Maybe it’s time for us to rethink the grind.
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