Work? You either love it or you hate it. For Ecclesiastes there is an ambivalence (read 2:17 and 24). You can either dread it or find satisfaction in it. I grew up in a family whose life was their work. We lived in the business and we worked from the time we got up in the morning to when we retired for the night, seven days of the week. There were no days off or vacations. There was no privacy or family time. Of course there was recreation. My parents played golf and I played rugby and ran track at school. But most of our time we were working. After high school I went to university and worked during vacations. After graduating I took five jobs to save for graduate school. After I was ordained at 23 years old I worked until I was seventy seven. Retirement was hard for me because I loved my job, but it was time to devote myself completely to my wife and learn to accept my limitations and stage of life.

Work is a tyrannical master. It can control you and become your god if we devote ourselves to it. Sociologists have a term for it: workism. It can become the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose. In the modern era it has become the chief repository of male identity, and is becoming the same for females. In the end it does not satisfy. When I was fifty seven I went to a counselor to explore my identity. It had become unhealthily bound up with my work. What was going to happen when I changed my job or was no longer able to work? Who would I then become?

Ecclesiastes 2:17-26 explores the result of looking to work and career for meaning in life. All too often when we move on in life we find that all that we have worked for is left to someone else who may or may not succeed or fail. All the effort and skill that we have worked for is given to someone who has not worked for it and does not appreciate what they have inherited. All the pain and grief that he has endured trying to succeed, all the worries that he has endured comes to nothing in the hands of his successor. My parents put thirty five years of hard work into their business and after they sold out it burned down thirty years later.

We can find satisfaction and enjoyment in our work if we see it as from the hand of God. Our work can be a vocation, a calling from God if we dedicate it to him and as a service to others. “Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does.” (Ephesians 5:7-8)

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything

To do it as for Thee.

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps the room, as for Thy laws,

Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold;

For that which God doth touch and own

Cannot for less be sold.

(George Herbert)