My mother passed away on September 30. Over the years (to make a long story short) I figured out how to have good time with my daughter and also time to help my elderly parents. My dad died in 1999, and now my mom is gone, too. I feel grateful I was able to be available for their needs as they dealt with the challenges of old age.
Work and family can be hard to balance in many kinds of vocations and professions. What if you’re working more than one job, not because you’re greedy for a certain lifestyle but because you can’t otherwise make ends meet? What if your one job is extremely time consuming? People who run their own businesses, for instance, scarcely have a minute to spare. How then do you manage and create family time?
The Christian ethicist Eric Mount also calls attention to workplaces that subtly punish employees if they, for instance, showed a tendency to want to balance work and family. Difficulties increase when the workplace demands an imbalanced sense of loyalty. Cell phones and laptops make possible even more work, now done at home. On the other hand, according to research cited by Mount, some people’s home environment is sufficiently difficult that spending more time at work seems a positive option (Covenant, Community, and the Common Good, Pilgrim Press, 1999, p. 90).
Mount writes, “What puts conscience in a bind in even more troubling ways are the conflicts between competing loyalties in which both covenants [marriage and work] have legitimate and convincing claims on us. Marriage, family, church, friendship, race, ethnicity, gender, class, nation, region, city, global community, school, team, club, professional organization or standards, employers, labor union, political party, social cause, and the environment or nature all may have claims on us and may have received explicit or implicit promises for us” (p. 88).
What he calls these “covenantal conflicts” are certainly challenging; we know what he means about conflicting loyalties and claims upon us. He notes, for instance, the prevalence of dual career families and the accompanying stress. According to one study from Duke University, working mothers had high stress-hormone levels throughout their waking hours, owing to multiple responsibilities of work, household duties, and child-rearing duties (p. 88).
My wife and I struggle with a related but different challenge: we love our work so much that we hate to turn it off sometimes! Beth and I have to be mindful of the need for "down time" and recreative moments. I freely admit that I derive a sense of emotional well-being from my work and struggle with self-esteem if work is in a temporary slump.
It's important to remember God's will for all of us: to balance work, family, and rest. God is not a fussy boss, keeping track of hours we spend at labor. As Mount points out in this context, God established the Sabbath as a day when no one (not even the animals and servants of biblical times) did any work at all. God also established a sabbatical year so that nature itself could replenish itself. God wills for us to have strong families and times of renewal (p. 92-93).
But to say “this is God’s will for us” doesn’t seem to matter if your workplace and/or your family situation adds stress and imbalance to yourself and others. What is the solution?
There are no easy answers, particularly in our contemporary time with its serious economic challenges. When many people can’t find good jobs, you might risk even greater problems if you try to make hasty and poorly-considered changes in your life.
1 Timothy 3:4-5 has to do with the qualifications of a church bishop, but applied broadly, the passage stresses a need for balance. If a person cannot (for whatever reason) manage one’s own household, how can one do well in one’s employment? Finding that balance may not be something we can do alone; as in my own life, we'll need family members working together, and we’ll need to call upon God to help us over a period of months and perhaps years. Better to begin to seek those changes, though, and start the process with God's guidance.
(This piece is an "outtake" of another project.)
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