I find reading the Bible refreshing and transforming. In the Bible, I find the original intent and purpose of the Creator for His world. The Creator’s purpose in so many ways supercedes the thoughts and plans of creation no matter how nice and beautiful they are. One of the most persistent thoughts that plague the minds of many youth I know is about their work or career. We spend a large part of our lives in school where we are trained to excel in a particular profession, or at least that is what we are led to believe. However, beyond all the fuss about work, career and profession, I want us to delve a few inches deeper to see the human condition and principle working behind the scenes.
When was the last time someone asked you a question like “What work do you do?” If you’re like the rest of us, your answer was probably something like “Oh… I’m an accountant, doctor, lawyer etc.” Our default response to doing (what work we do) is being (who we are). Simply put, somewhere deep within, we have imbibed the philosophy which tells us that we are what we do. I don’t really know how this philosophy helps except to make its adherents completely dissatisfied with themselves thus making them workaholics who never seem to have enough of work. This shouldn’t be so and it wasn’t so in the beginning. How was it like in the beginning? Well, let’s find out.
In what is popularly known as the book of beginnings, Genesis gives an account of the origin of all things (almost all things). It portrays the Creator as an intelligent Craftsman who came up with everything including man. Man was the crème de la crème of all the Creator’s work. It was the Creator that first instituted the notion of work as recorded in Genesis 2:15
” And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Man was assigned a duty by the Creator to dress and keep the garden of Eden. So I guess that pretty much makes gardening the most ancient of all work. But I want us to appreciate the Creator’s intelligence here: Even before He gave man work, He had already set straight man’s identity…”And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… ” (Genesis 1:26). Man’s identity is that he’s made in the image of God (and that’s a really big truth we have here).
Hence man was to go around carrying the consciousness that he’s the image of God. So even when man slept, he was image of God; when he ate, strolled through the garden and played, it was God’s image doing all these stuff. Work was no exception; when man worked, it was God’s image working. Thus from the beginning, man did not derive his sense of identity from work but work was more of a manifestation of his already established identity.
Evolution has played a big prank on humanity when it comes to our work and our sense of identity. Being through the industrial age has conditioned us away from our true identity to one that is unstable and activity based. We feel less of ourselves because we feel the incessant demand that we haven’t done enough. Till date, no one really knows what enough is. The need to be is peharps the strongest of all man’s needs and it screams and beckons us to be reunited to our true identities but the problem is that most of us still don’t know for sure who we are. Our closest guess remains what we do.
In this activity crazed world we have today, it has become more important than ever to be secure in our identities. This isn’t simply a luxury, it’s a necessity for thriving in this world. When our identity is rightly deciphered, work ceases to take us over and run our lives but it becomes a wonderful opportunity for us to manifest our God-given potential. If there’s a single strategy for establishing a work- life balance then this is it; the realization that your identity supercedes what you do.
Restpiration 