ARTICLES

by Dr. Josh Moody

One of the more common tropes of our day is the importance of work life balance. We are presented with those who spend their days thinking about work, planning to work, dreaming about work, planning work, and generally organizing their life and days around work. Think of Elon Musk, say, famously sleeping on the floor of organizations he wishes to turnaround—or something of that kind. The endlessly working career driven architect of the future. I’ve met many such people during my days. Driven through elite universities—astonishing amount of work to get there in the first place—and out towards the upwardly mobile rat race of Wall Street in New York or The City in London, or the equivalents around the globe. Is this really life as it is meant to be lived?

On the other hand there are those who have reacted against this extreme way of living and advocated for a so-called work life balance. After all, there is family. There are holidays or vacations. There are things to do beyond trying to get ahead and climb the old greasy pole. Such things, such living, should be prioritized, or at the least balanced with the aptitude and ambition to do more, to move fast and break things as the tech sector once boasted in its quest for glory.

No doubt there are innumerable variables under these apertures of options, and no doubt the scenarios can be as simple as the single binary choice between working to live and living to work. But so the options are presented to us, very often, and with a certain morality around the quest for work life balance. It would be to trivialize it to say that people seem to be looking to spend more time on the golf course than in the boardroom. And it would be too dismissive to cast away the concerns about work life balance with a cursory shrug—or a glance at the need for leadership in our world today, or the competitiveness of the corporate world. The old joke that no one on their death bed wishes they’d spent more time in the office surely has something to it. Should we, as has been argued, not be thinking more about eulogy virtues than resume virtues? The kind of thing that we want people to say about us at our funerals, rather than merely the kind of things that we can put on our resume to impress people with our productivity now?

It seems to me, though, that there is a better way for Christians to frame this conversation than this binary choice between the rat race and the desire to live for the weekend, work from home, and do as little as necessary to fuel the kind of lifestyle we wish to have. Partly, it seems, this is a rather parochial way of looking at the world, and even perhaps insensitive. To even have the conversation reeks of privilege. So many people in our world have no option but to work as hard as they can when they can in order to survive.

But even more than the necessary task of framing the conversation in a broader canvas than among those who can choose careers, it seems shaped by a view of life that is not quite, well, biblical. A recent book advocates on similar grounds that we are to think of our life not so much as a race to get to the top, but rather as a journey to be accompanied with friends and family. It’s hard not to agree with some of that as a Christian, but on the other hand the feeling it leaves of lack of drive and passivity is also quite hard to square with the apostle Paul’s admonition to forget what is behind and strain towards what is ahead—let alone his storied life of ceaseless commitment to preaching and missionary work and writing and more. Even more to the point, Jesus himself hardly seems to be someone who does the work that he needs to do so that he can relax at the weekends with his friends and family. In fact, speaking of his family, one time they were so concerned about this endless activity that they thought he had lost his mind and tried to take charge of him. Another time he urged his disciples to come away with him and rest a while, only for them to be chased down by a crowd—which crowd he then accepted and continued to minister to. Indeed, they were so busy, we are told, they hardly had time to eat. This is not, whatever else it is, work-life balance.

No, instead there is a better picture that emerges from the pages of the New Testament. One that assuages worldliness (which is really at the root of the problem of living to work) and selfish ambition, and instead, made fully alive by the Spirit, we are called to give our lives in service and mission and evangelism and discipleship that others might have life too. Each disciple becoming a disciple maker.

I won’t mention his name because in some circles he would be familiar, and who he is is beside the point. But I remember one theologian, now deceased, who after he had finally given up writing books, and certainly given up teaching, now in his old people’s home, who merrily went around encouraging, discipling, teaching and ministering to all the other people in the home. I think of my own godly grandmother who, to the family’s great amusement, continued to deliver meals-on-wheels to the elderly well into her own 80s. No slowing down there. But a life that is lived to give life to others.

So no more odd choice between working to live and living to work. No, instead, let us live to help others to be able to live too. And from that there is no retirement. Nor is it really a balance as such. It’s life lived on purpose. We are not, pastors note, to sacrifice our families on the altar of our selfish ministerial ambitions. It’s God first (we must love him more even than our families), but then family, and only after that ministry. But neither are we, let us all note, to live in a way that is more interested in capturing a moment around a restaurant table that can be captured for Instagram, at the expense of witnessing to our waiter. Or as a waiter witnessing to the table we are serving. Here we have a purpose to live for Christ in any endeavor, something that gives us a meaning and value as a high school student, as a college student, as a mid-life professional, and as an older person too. Or, to put it in apostolic terms, for us to live is Christ and to die is gain.