I’m just coming out of a very intensive season of work with many overlapping activities and needs. We recently experienced several mountaintop-like signs of God’s goodness and fruitfulness through our work this past year with great encouragement. Included in all this, however, is a sense of exhaustion and burnout. I need to slow way down, reflect, get some deep rest, experience beauty and joy, be with family and friends, and listen well to what God is calling me to in the coming season.
The Temptation
A temptation for me is to assume this past season has been a classic one of “lack of work-life balance.” I sometimes feel I should be, especially as a Christian, full of a constant experience of joy, peace, overflow of God’s grace, and shalom all the time. What many of us are struggling to do in our busy lives is find a continual sense of perfect peace and rest with a healthy approach to both self-care and care of loved ones. Scrambling to learn the best program of diet, exercise, mindfulness, work schedule, time with family, church involvement, and housekeeping makes most of us anxious and stressed out just thinking about it.
“The mission of God in the world through the gospel of Jesus Christ is the reconciliation and restoration of all things in heaven and on earth.”
The Lie
But there is a lie at work here; namely, the pitting of our daily activities of vocational work against what we think of as life itself. In other words, we’ve disassociated what we see as life-giving and deeply fulfilling activities from our daily labor. Even those of us who have come to believe that our work is intrinsically part of God's greater purposes for this world still find ourselves using the language of finding the right work-life balance (myself included) to address overwork, exhaustion, and stress.
Why? Our culture, both in and out of the church, still strongly and many times unintentionally prioritizes spiritual, relational, and self-care goals over what is taking place in our work lives. We believe God is somehow just not as present or concerned with what's going on in our work as he is in our families, church groups, charitable work, or recreational activities. The mission of God in the world through the gospel of Jesus Christ is the reconciliation and restoration of all things in heaven and on earth (see Col. 1:20 & Rev. 21:5). If that is true, every moment and activity of every day needs to be viewed as present before the face of God and rich in potential for his involvement, concern, and care.
Secondly, placing God’s plan for our daily lives into a highly regulated schedule of competing priorities is neither practical nor responsive to God moment by moment. David Bahnsen in his recent excellent book Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life states this boldly,
“Parenting is full of unknowns. Marriage is as well. Oh, and so is your job. Placing artificial constraints on one of these variable aspects of our life because of a demand for “balance” is impractical, immature, entitled, and futile… We are only conditioned to believe that an overfocus in one area of life causes neglect in other areas with one thing: work!
‘Work-life balance’ is a poorly phrased euphemism for asking someone to work less, think about work less, or care about work less…
When we refer to a work-life balance, we are linguistically pitting two things against each other. We are presupposing that one is not a part of the other, and in fact, that the two are to some degree at odds.”
““Work-life balance” is a poorly phrased euphemism for asking someone to work less, think about work less, or care about work less…”
Replace Balance with Calling
A better way of addressing the seasonal stresses of overwork and weary discouragement in our work lives is to replace the need for balance with the concept of calling. Rather than seeking to juggle the hours and percentages of our lives between family, self-care, church, and daily labor, we need to prayerfully live out the specific and seasonal expressions of our greater call to follow Jesus and his purposes for our lives.
This means that a parent with small children who is called by God to invest more heavily in their family for a season must emphasize this without guilt or apprehension as they say no to taking on a job with exhausting projects requiring long hours and weekends. This means that the person who, after careful discernment about their next step vocationally, has taken on a new job or is back in school for additional training or is part of leading a new start-up business must lean into the longer hours and demands of this season without feeling that they have left God behind since their special church projects or preferred self-care activities will take a back seat for a season.
“We live and grow in Christ through all the hills and valleys, challenges and joys, gains and losses. ”
A good and wise friend recently used the analogy of making sure you don't "drop the same ball consistently" when talking about the demands of a working parent. This is a great reminder that busy parents need grace but also don't get to opt out of our call to be a parent when our jobs get hectic. However, it's important to not use this as an excuse to skip out on our call in a specific season of life that requires more involvement as a parent or at work.
We cannot do it all. We must make choices and let life be dynamic and the grand adventure that it actually is. We live and grow in Christ through all the hills and valleys, challenges and joys, gains and losses. Work is life—every bit as much as family, church involvement, self-care, rest, and other important activities to which God calls us. Different seasons call us to make different (and hard) choices. So, drop the notion of fine-tuning the perfect work-life balance. Prayerfully, and with the council of wise community, choose the call of God this season and rest in the freedom of confident hope that God will provide for those less attended to areas of our lives. God is so much more able and faithful to meet our needs than our best efforts to simply try harder will ever achieve.
And now, for that needed season of rest and joy…
Steve is the Executive Director here at the Center for Faith + Work Los Angeles and leads the vision and overall ministry. Prior to this position, Steve was as an aerospace executive at The Boeing Company after 36 years of service.