Maybe your week has been as busy as mine. There’s a good chance it has. What pushes me over the edge from busy into frenzy is the number of different things that need to be taken care of, in addition to my regular 9-5. Multi-tasking is fun up to a point, and then crosses some invisible line, and I lose my mind. This week that line was crossed and I began to resent all the “extras” that were filling my time, causing me to be in the car driving around more than normal, making personal phone calls at work and generally diverting my attention every 30 minutes. I just wanted to be in one place, focusing on one thing for more than a few hours at a time. Ah, what a luxury! What I realised was that the place to find the most relief from the frenzy was………at work. At work I could sit down for a while. At work I could chat to people. At work I could enjoy a cup of coffee. By some strange twist, work had become rest.
I’ve come across this before. I remember a work colleague whose wife had just had a baby. He returned to work after a relatively short paternity leave. Surprised by his hasty return, we all encouraged him to go home and be with his new family. Through his sleep-deprived haze he pleaded with us to let him stay at work. There was peace and quiet there.
In our efforts to keep work in its place and to take rest seriously, it seems that mixing the two, even reversing the two, is very dangerous. If our place of work is the most restful place to be, the danger is we will want to spend more time there and less time at home with our friends and family. Is it true rest if we’re at work? I don’t think so.
If work is our rest then we have lost our way. We have allowed our time to be hijacked by all kinds of other activities and errands and concerns. If work is rest then I'm not sure we have any rest at all.
Philomena
Heaven is the only place we'll be able to focus on one thing with all our attention and energy. The sabbath rest is the picture of that here on earth, and why I think we need to focus on how important it is, to keep that model (and aim)of heaven in mind. If work becomes our heaven, we have the curse become the blessing.
As for me, my week's been more hell than heaven!
Posted by: Thomas More | February 08, 2008 at 07:04 PM
It's probably just the path of least resistance, i.e. it's easier to make work peaceful than to make home peaceful (depending on what your work and home lives look like!). But, I think home should be the real place of rest, at least for one day of the week.
Posted by: Philomena | February 09, 2008 at 02:53 PM
Any time you have young kids (especially newborns) at home, it's not going to be a very restful place. My husband used to joke whenever we had a newborn that he couldn't wait for a good business trip! This didn't win him any points, mind you, but I understood his sentiment. If home cannot be a relaxing place, at least it should be a place free of stress and uncomfortable relationships, so that -- at least when the kids go down -- you can rest with your spouse!
Lucy
Posted by: Lucy | February 12, 2008 at 12:12 PM