A work saturated season

A Work Saturated Season

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            This will be a different sort of blog for me. I won’t discuss any issues. It’s mostly about my life at present. I work at a job where we get seasons of 72 hour work weeks about every fifteen months or so. I am in one of those seasons, which lasts four to six weeks now.

I generally hate these seasons of long work hours. A co-worker once described his perspective about a job. He inherited his viewpoint from his father who told him to view a job like one would a tool. You use it, you take care of it, but when it’s time you put it up for later. A job is never one’s whole life. A career may be closer to one’s life, but even a career should never be the reason for our existence. It is certainly wonderful if we obtain satisfaction and feel a purpose for our work, but our work is always simply a portion of life. So I often feel as if I am deprived of life when I get into these seasons of long work hours.

But this time working long hours hasn’t been a season that I have hated like I have others like it in the past. I’ve learned to accept that this is part of the work I do. Others know seasons of long work weeks as well. I come from a farm background and there are farmers in my extended family. When planting, cultivating, and harvest seasons come around they work long hours. During other times of the year they have some times when their hours are not quite as long. But in those special seasons they know the extras in life get cut way back. So this time around as I went into a season with long hours I realized that I wouldn’t have a lot of free time. So I decided this time to try to prioritize that small amount of free time instead of feeling upset that I didn’t have time to do all the things I imagine need done.

For me I made my priority to have devotionals and do a little bit of reading each day. To be honest my attempts at having daily devotionals and regular prayer time has been sporadic. I tend to waste a lot of time to be honest. Strange as it may seem now that I have so little free time when I am not working, eating, or sleeping – I have actually had consistent devotionals especially in the morning. I have gotten my older copy of the Book of Common Prayer out, have prayed the Morning Prayers and followed the readings. I have managed to work through readings in three books, by simply making sure I read a few pages each day.

I say this to encourage others of you that sometimes when you feel like you have failed umpteen times to establish a regular prayer and devotional life, that sometimes when you would least expect it you obtain a desired breakthrough. I can only think of Jacob wrestling with the angel, desiring a blessing. The moment comes in the fight when it seems like you have completely lost. You are limping, but with the limp there is the long desired blessing. For me that is what this season is like. I wake up in the morning, knowing the day will be busy and I turn to at least a few moments in prayer, a little bit of reading and after breakfast I make it to work hoping to treat others with respect, and hoping to be compassionate in carrying out my work duties. For the most part my attitude hasn’t been nearly as sour as in the past. That doesn’t mean tomorrow when I go to work I won’t be tempted to lose my cool, to get upset with life, etc. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I am realizing that now.

The three books I have been written all can be broken up into small sections, ideal for the type of reading I am doing in this season of long hours. I am reading a Lenten devotional book of daily meditations a few pages long. I am going through Maggi Dawn’s book Giving it Up. Maggi Dawn was at one time a Christian singer, and moved on to obtaining a Cambridge degree and is now a Yale professor. Her meditations have the wonderful ability of speaking to Christians across the divided world of the Christian faith. I can imagine either a progressive Christian or a conservative Christian reading her meditations and coming away satisfied with fresh thoughts with which to worship and serve God. A second book, I have been reading is Roots and Sky by Christie Purifoy. As she has described it, she traded a professorship in literature for a farmhouse in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and children. The house they called “Maplehurst” is an old farm house built in the nineteenth century. They have envisioned turning the house into a place where they can provide hospitality to friends, family, and visitors. I have never met the Purifoy family, but Christie Purifoy’s blog site and her book are examples of an outreach of hospitality. She provides a place for serenity and rest in this often times wearying world. The third book I have been reading in this time is Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness. Dorothy Day, will likely one day be canonized as a Catholic saint for the work she did among the weary workers of Depression era America. When people mentioned her as a saint she found the suggestion humorous. So perhaps if she is canonized on earth there will be a bit of laughter in heaven. The beauty of the work is that you realize there is a creative work to be done in our modern and postmodern times, a work of discovering a place for authentic genuine humanity. That is what you realize in reading The Long Loneliness was the work that Dorothy Day sought to do unto the Lord among the marginalized lost souls of America’s working class in hard times. Overall this has been a season with only a little free time, but it has been blessed by God and I am hopeful that what I have learned to do with only a little free time might be built upon when more free time comes this way. I feel like a farmer who knows that though the planting time is busy it will prove fruitful.

I’ve realized that the three books I have been reading have all been by women. I have pretty much tried to avoid the battlegrounds of gender issues. I have too many friends in the varied groups of complementarians, egalitarians, Christian feminists and whatever identity one wishes to apply to themselves. But of this much I am certain. Quite often God has used women to give birth to the divine life in this world. He has named Deborah and Huldah among the prophets of old. For me, I have felt as though Maggi Dawn, Christie Purifoy, and Dorothy Day have helped stir divine life into my soul. So it has been a season of blessing, which is something I didn’t expect when I began this season of 72 hour work weeks.