Thought for Today
Psalm 141:4 Do not turn my heart to any evil, to busy myself with wicked deeds in company with those who work iniquity; do not let me eat of their delicacies.
Ecclesiastes 3:10 I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with.
Romans 13:6 For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, busy with this very thing.
James 1:11 For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.
In your life today, what has God given you with which to be busy? Hopefully at least some of you noticed that I did not write anything yesterday. Greta and I had a busy day. We set our alarm for very early and left the house by 8:00am. We did not return until early evening.
Many of us are in that time of life when comments about us are often followed by, “for someone his/her age.” We are in the time about which the author Walter C. Wright wrote in his book The Third Third of Life (InterVarsity Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8308-3796-0) One of the joys of this time of life is being freed from the tyranny of the alarm clock. No longer must I set an alarm each day to ensure that I wake, complete my morning routine and set out into the ‘commuter wars’ in time to get to the office. For the 44+ years of my first career, I dreamed of being freed from the tyranny of that alarm clock . . . and now I am (usually) free.
During all those years of that first career, I forgot the basic truth of Genesis 2:15, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” God did not create God’s children to be creatures of leisure. Even in highly technologically advanced societies, God’s children were created to ‘till’ the gardens of Creation. Sometimes those gardens involve science and technology, sometimes business and finance, sometimes agriculture or other elements of society. Even though the word ‘busy’ only appears about 6 times in the Bible, we were created to be busy.
There is another simple but subtle truth in that verse from Genesis. God created us to be busy with productive work. Weeding and tilling a garden is a requirement necessary to allow that garden to productively produce nutritious, healthy food and/or beautiful flowers.
Thankfully, in that third third of life, we may no longer be required to lift the heavy loads of soil or fertilizer. We may no longer be required to dig the deep holes or chop down the toughest weeds and vines. But, as any gardener can affirm, there is still much work to be done . . . “for someone his/her age.”
Yesterday, Greta and I were about some of the work to be done in our own third third of life. The specifics of that work are not important (or maybe even interesting to many); it is the existence of that work that is important to our physical, mental and spiritual health. “Even though health depreciates over time, some studies have asserted that retirement leads to an improvement in general health and perceived health (Coe and Zamarro Reference Coe and Zamarro2011; Latif Reference Latif2012), a substantial decrease in mental and physical fatigue and depressive symptoms (Westerlund et al. Reference Westerlund, Vahtera, Ferrie, Singh-Manoux, Pentti, Melchior, Leineweber, Jokela, Siegrist, Goldberg, Zins and Kivimäki2010) and an increase in physical activity from sedentary occupations (Glasson et al. Reference Glasson, Panter, Ogilvie and Patterson2023).” (www.cambridge.org)
You may not be interested in researching online about the correlations between being busy and being healthy in retirement. That’s okay. Most of us in our own third third of life have found the truth of Genesis 2:15. Yesterday was a busy day for Greta and for me. We are a tad out of the habit of busy days. At the end of the day yesterday, we were both glad to be back at home and able to sit down and rest. We were tired; but, it felt good to be tired and to know that we had done our share of tilling and keeping God’s garden.
Stay safe, stay busy, trust God,
Pastor Ray