My first job was short-term employment. I suppose you could say I was a day laborer. A neighbor hired me to weed her lawn. She provided me with a two-pronged weeding fork and promised to pay me five dollars when I was done. At the time it sounded like a fortune. I said yes eagerly, carried away by visions of all the comic books I intended to purchase with the money I earned. Plus this was work I could do in a more or less recumbent position.
But once I was on my hands and knees in the hot sun, my enthusiasm soon diminished. The lawn looked bigger from that angle than I had first imagined. There were more weeds than I thought. As the sweat trickled down the back of my neck, I poked them half-heartedly with the weeding fork, pausing every few minutes to scan the yard and see what kind of progress I was making. The view was not encouraging. The number of weeds appeared to be growing not shrinking.
After a while, I persuaded myself that I had worked long enough. There was still a weed or two left but surely my employer didn’t expect me to pull every single weed? She did. “You’re done already?” she asked skeptically when I went to the door to collect my money. Then she walked the lawn with me, pointing out the weeds that still remained and grumbling about my work ethic. There were more than I thought. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed them. Probably because they were the same color as the grass, I reasoned. With a sigh, I knelt down again and went back to work, this time with even less enthusiasm than before. Eventually, my employer paid me off and sent me on my way. By now more eager to be rid of me than of the weeds.
“A sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth” Proverbs 26:15. I suppose my unhappy employer would have said that a sluggard buries his hand in the lawn, too lazy to pluck out the weeds. The sin that the ancients called sloth or acedia certainly includes laziness but it also involves more. Sloth has many features and manifests itself in many forms. At times it looks like what we call ennui, an immobilizing lethargy that leeches away our interest in those things that ought to concern us. Other forms of sloth are more active and profligate. We squander our time and energy on meaningless trifles at the expense of other obligations.
In our day sloth is often reflected in what is falsely called leisure. Sometimes this involves empty activity that does not provide either rest or pleasure. It is marked by a kind of frenetic busyness whose aim is to distract us from whatever is making us uncomfortable. Theologian Joseph Pieper observes that true leisure has a different character. Leisure is a kind of silence. It is an attitude of contemplation: “Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.”
True leisure is marked by an attitude of confidence and peace. It is grounded in trust and particularly in trust in God. The essence of leisure is expressed in Psalm 138:8: “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever—do not abandon the works of your hands.” By this definition, true leisure is as important to our work as it is to our play. Leisure as most people describe it is merely time off. Leisure as God defines it is a state of grace. It is the ability to rest in God, confident that He will bring to completion all that concerns me according to His plan.
If you are interested in learning more about the Bible’s theology of rest, you might enjoy The Radical Pursuit of Rest: Escaping the Productivity Trap by John Koessler (IVP).
