Idle vs. Park

I snapped this photo at my parking lot almost a couple of years ago. Heh, heh, heh. Yeah, I know. My neighbors have a sense of humor.

Last weekend at church, the sermon was about Sabbath and resting. So, I thought I would share my two cents on the subject here. As was observed during the sermon, celebrating the new year tends to be a time when people naturally analyze how they spend their time. Perhaps this post could also be titled "Confessions of a Former Workaholic."

"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it." (Exodus 20:8-11)

"At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, 'Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!' ... 'But if you had known what this means, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.' " (Matthew 12:1-2, 7-8)

"Now it happened, as He went into the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath, that they watched Him closely. And behold, there was a certain man before Him who had dropsy. And Jesus, answering, spoke to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?' But they kept silent. And He took him and healed him, and let him go. Then He answered them, saying, 'Which of you, having a donkey or an ox that has fallen into a pit, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?' And they could not answer Him regarding these things." (Luke 14:1-6)

My birth mother was a slothful, lazy woman, and my birth father was a mega workaholic supreme. So, I basically grew up with two examples of how NOT to work and rest. When I would get sick as a child (which was often), my mother would usually keep me home from school an extra day so that I could "rest," even though I was well enough to return to school, and even though I had already done nothing but rest for a couple of days. After I moved back home as an adult, my father was involved in projects that would occupy his time pretty much 24/7, even on Sundays after he would return home from church. On one such Sunday, while I was taking a shower, he yelled at me through the bathroom door to ask me how much it would cost to mail something to a customer via FedEx. I wish I could tell you that I was gracious to him when I turned off the shower and yelled back a reply, but I was not.

When I finally ventured out on my own permanently as an adult, I identified more with the workaholic side of my gene pool than with the slothful side. I feel very alive when I have something to do. Even if I'm fighting an illness, I get a real rush from getting ready for the day, walking out the door, and driving to work. It's exhilarating. It makes me feel human. Honestly, I think all human beings should feel healthy just from getting out of bed and being human.

But I noticed the unhealthy aspect of my workaholic tendencies a few years ago. I was working at a job that did not pay much at all, but it offered many opportunities for overtime. I had just bought a new car, and I needed to work overtime to make the payments. I would show up for work on Saturday mornings with nobody else around, and I remember thinking that since I didn't have people to spend time with over the weekends, I might as well just go to work. I was covering up my aching loneliness with work.

After a while, an opportunity for freelance writing came along, and I took it. For six months, in addition to working overtime at work whenever it was offered, I was also working a freelance writing job at home until very late at night. I believe I pulled an all-nighter on a couple of occasions. During those six months, I would often work seven days a week straight. I would go to church, but I wouldn't take a Sabbath. That was a mistake. At the end of those six months, I was completely exhausted, and I even blogged here about my exhaustion that New Year's Eve.

When I finally started observing a Sabbath intentionally, God took me through a period where He was training me to rest. Apparently, I didn't know how. I remember on Sunday afternoons, He would instruct me to do nothing for two hours. That was hard for me. It was hard for me to recline on my couch, turn on some reruns of I Love Lucy, and enjoy them for two straight hours. I guess I was feeling guilty about not doing anything. That was pretty extreme.

But sometimes God has to be extreme when He squeezes stuff out of you.

"We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the food they eat." (2 Thessalonians 3:11-12)

I used to have a friend who would call me once or twice a week and talk for at least 45 minutes at a time. She was definitely an idle gossip. By that, I mean that she would talk incessantly about everybody, and she would download every frickin' detail of her life to me over the phone. She would give me way too much information. And I participated in this by listening to it all. But by the time I realized that her behavior was unhealthy, it was too late. The only way to stop her from calling me was to end the friendship.

I was lonely and naïve, so I allowed her to leech off me (and eat up all my time) this way. She was being treated for multiple types of mental illness, so she probably didn't realize how unacceptable her behavior was. She was also very intelligent, but she was on disability because she supposedly couldn't focus on a work task long enough to hold down a job... and yet, she didn't have a problem focusing on 90-minute phone monologues with me.

Going back to the subject of rest, God told me awhile back something that helped me a lot. He said that there is a difference between "idle" and "park." If my car is "idle," it's running, and it's supposed to be taking me somewhere, but it isn't. It's just sitting there running, and it's using up the battery, it's using up my gas, and it's emitting pollutants into the atmosphere. "Idle" is unhealthy. My 90-minute-phone-calling former friend was idle.

On the other hand, "park" is healthy. My car was specifically built with a capability to "park." If my car is parked, that means the engine is off, the battery is resting, my gas is being saved up for the next time I need to use it, and I can take a deep breath and enjoy sitting quietly in my car before I leave it, lock it, and go to work. People have built acres of lots specifically for the purpose of me "park"ing my car in them. Some people even profit from parking lots. Parking your car when you're not using it is very important. If you don't park your car properly, you could endanger yourself and other people. Anytime I observe the Sabbath, I put myself in "park."

So, recovering from being a workaholic has involved me wrestling through the concepts of work and resting. Now I guard my Sabbaths, holidays, and rest time very fiercely.

For example, this past New Year's Eve, my boss planned to close the office at 3:00 p.m. for the holiday. That also happened to be a deadline for us to finish a certain task at work. (I've noticed that we're very laidback about meeting deadlines, which isn't a problem at all because of the nature of our business.) On New Year's Eve at 2:30, one of my supervisors came into my office and announced that her boss had found more deadline-sensitive work that needed to be done. I replied matter-of-factly, "As long as everyone understands that I'm leaving at THREE, I'm OK with that." She laughed and said that the work could wait until Monday.

God has been pretty fierce about guarding my rest time, too, and He's helped me set some major boundaries to separate my rest time from my work time. For instance, my previous job offered one work-from-home day per week (and usually frowned upon you NOT taking it). Working from home chafed my soul like crazy. (I mean, when you're at work, you're supposed to work. When you're at home, you're supposed to rest. Right?) So, after I lost that job and prayed about finding a new one, God very clearly said, "No more of this work-from-home nonsense."

Regarding the Sabbath, I think the Bible is pretty clear that as long as you set aside one day a week for the specific purpose of resting, the way you do so is between you and God.

For me, in this season of my life, it's most natural to observe my Sabbath on Saturday, when I'm exhausted from the work week and don't really feel like doing anything, anyway. What rejuvenates me the most on the Sabbath is getting to spend time with people who I'm close to, but if they're unavailable, I've found other ways to entertain myself. I play my piano keyboard, or I watch opera videos on YouTube, or I watch a music DVD, or I read a Charles Dickens book to myself out loud, and I definitely feed my babies some catnip, and I most definitely go to church. For me personally, the goal during the Sabbath is to do absolutely nothing, and the fact that this goal will be met in a different way every week is very thrilling.

I also still wrestle with being legalistic when observing my Sabbath (because I used to be a fun-killing Pharisee), so I talk to God a lot about what counts as "work" for me to avoid during my Sabbaths. Again, each Sabbath looks a little bit differently to me, but in general, I don't do housework unless it's absolutely necessary. (I save that for Sunday.) And sometimes, depending on what's going on, I'll take my Sabbath on a Sunday instead.

One thing that God instructed me to do on weekends when I'm singing in the choir at church is to take a "double Sabbath." In other words, I guess you could consider practicing music, rehearsing with the choir, and standing for hours on the church platform to be "work," but as soon as I get home, my goal is to do absolutely nothing. That happens two days in a row. And my feet are happy to oblige.

And as I end this particular post, my large cat is idly parked on my arm while I am typing. Heh, heh, heh.