over-work

It's been another long day! As you can see from the time.

I don't ever work fixed hours. Which means my time is flexible. But it also means you can't ever tell if you're 'done'.

It's a common problem, I suspect. More and more I'm meeting up with people whose circumstances, one way or another, are like this. The demands that are made get bigger and more. And they don't have an easy way out.

For a lot of such folk, if it's not quite killing them (sometimes it's getting close to that), it's certainly killing the pleasure they once would have known in the work that they daily do.

Most of such folk, they actually like their work. Find it all fulfilling. But the way what's involved encraoches on all of their life and leaves them with little free time to call their own - it's that which slowly kills off their enjoyment of their work.

It is, I think, a societal problem at root. But it's sometimes worse within the Christian church. We call it 'ministry' not work as if somehow that maybe sort of justifies it all.

It certainly makes it harder to object.

This isn't a complaint on my own behalf. I love my work and don't myself feel hard done by at all. I get looked after here by others really well and never feel the pressures others know.

No. It's more an observation from the people that I meet with and am chatting to each day. There's a pattern I'm observing and it isn't all that great.

There was someone today I spent with again. And that, I can see, is the issue. It's 'christian' work, but the person involved is very much the 'default' box, who ends up doing the things that must be done.

Gladly so, in principle. But the volume of 'stuff' that ends in the default box is slowly sort of suffocating all the person's life.

Martyrdom and ministry are not the same, though often they're related. Working ourselves right into the ground (quite literally) is neither genuine ministry nor even glorious martyrdom. I think the Bible simply calls it 'sin'.

It's getting life wrong. Getting the 'set-up' wrong. Because it's often not the person's fault. It's just the way things work. Given the 'system', the way the whole thing's ordered. That's what needs to change.

As I say, a lot of my time these days is spent with folk like that. Addressing the problems there are in the context of their working lives.

And preparing for Sunday morning, it was striking to see how Paul addressed the problems that there were within the church in Corinth.

He didn't ignore such problems. He didn't just hope that somehow they would go away. He tackled the thing head on. And so must I.