Life’s Too Short To…Work All The Time
Life’s Too Short To…, prt. 4
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
4/24/05
In my previous church, Christy and I became friends with a couple – let’s call them George & Liz. I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent. And the not-so-innocent. George and Liz were a young couple who worked on my staff in my previous church.
Liz was a gifted servant and helper. She was also incredibly organized, so I quickly made her the official event registrar. She handled all event registrations, money, permission slips, and all that stuff I can’t stand working with. George seemed to have a heart for our teenage boys, so I spent some time with him and began teaching him to lead a small group. He was faithful, showing up prepared every week, always wanting to learn more.
After some time of working with them I began to detect that all was not well between George and Liz. Liz never outright complained, but I could tell she would have preferred George to spend more time at home. Eventually George and Liz approached me and asked if I’d be willing to see them for marriage counseling in my office. I agreed, and we began to meet. I soon found out that in addition to the technology business he was getting off the ground, George also was into Amway – which was no longer calling itself Amway but was still Amway. When he wasn’t at his business, he was off making his Amway pitches to whatever contacts he could drum up, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was away in Grand Rapids at Amway conventions, listening to talk about dreaming the big dreams and making it all happen for his family. There were even times when George would put his wife and two small children in the car and drive out and park in front of big houses and talk about how one day he was going to buy them a house like that. It was a technique he learned from Amway – something about envisioning the dream. It was all about big houses, fancy cars, swimming pools – you know – “American Dream” kind of stuff.
One evening as we sat in my office talking I had George look at Liz and I said, “George, did it ever occur to you that in reaching for one dream you might lose the other? George, listen to me. If you don’t start hearing your wife’s heart, you’re going to lose your family.” He said, “I don’t think so.” Liz looked at the floor and didn’t say anything at all.
This is the first time I encountered the phenomenon of married single motherhood. That’s what Liz was – a married single mother. Folks, life’s too short to work all the time. Even if you don’t lose them physically or emotionally, you’re going to miss out on the best years of your life, and you’ll never make the best memories you could have made. Last week I said you can’t hang on to a grudge and still receive all that God has for you. In the same way, you cannot invest the same amount of energy into building both a career and a family. Ultimately there will be times when something’s gotta give, and the thing that gives can only be your family so many times before you will lose them. It’s not a question of if, but a question of when.
George did lose Liz. Turns out several months later Liz found out George had been having an affair with his secretary – it had been going on for two or three months. Liz filed for divorce. A year later I met George for lunch. We were reminiscing about the good old days of working together in ministry and hanging out with each other. He got tears in his eyes after a while, and he said, “You know, I’d give anything to have Liz back, and to have my kids with me. Do you think she’d take me back? If only I had known this was going to happen. I know you said it would, but I just never thought it really would.” I wanted to put my arm on his shoulder and with deep sincerity say, “George, my friend, I know you are hurting. But what on God’s green earth did you think was going to happen? How much can you expect someone else to tolerate?” But I sat and listened, and said nothing. Liz never did take him back and three years later Christy and I had the bizarre experience of sitting on the sidelines of a soccer game where our girls were on a team with their daughter. George sat on one side of us with his new girlfriend (not the one he had had the affair with) and Liz sat on the other with her new boyfriend. It was surreal. And once again it was painful.
Now let’s think about the carnage in this one. A marriage has been broken. George is broken. Liz is broken. Two children are broken. Their church is broken. 40 teenage kids who looked up to these people, who were influenced by the investment of life into life, were broken. Christy and I were broken as we proceeded to watch the resulting disaster as our friends’ family – and their lives – came unglued. Many of us were broken as we were also brought into the pain that came from one man’s obsession with work. All of this pain, all of this emotional damage in the lives of children and adults, and in a church, because one guy wouldn’t stop working and go home to his wife and children. This all could have been avoided – and it could have been avoided with incredible ease. The ease of avoiding this kind of pain is what makes it so frustrating for me to see – the consequences of working all the time are so huge, and it’s just so easy to avoid it. What kinds of things would have prevented this?
George could have gone home and sat down at the table, and had a conversation with his wife from time to time. He could have gone home and played Candyland with his kids – nothing would have made his wife – and his kids – happier than that. He could have taken a day off here and there and arranged child care and taken his wife to a movie, or to dinner, or to a hotel for a getaway weekend. He could have gone home and suffered through the pain of watching Barney with his kids. He could have made it a point to be home for dinner. Any, or all, or some variation, of these things – just once in a while – could have saved his family – made him a hero to his wife and kids – and incidentally would have probably scored him some of that sex he had been missing which is at least partly why he ended up having the affair in the first place.
But notice all these “easy” things involved one thing George just could not bring himself to do. Go home.
Now let me tell you how I’m going to ride out the rest of this message. First I want to look quickly at why men have such a hard time leaving work to go home. Second I want to share with you some scripture that I believe will give us a godly perspective on this. Third, I want to give some tips to the fellas of how they can know when they are working too much.
Proverbs 5:18-19 (NLT)
18 Let your wife be a fountain of blessing for you. Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
19 She is a loving doe, a graceful deer. Let her breasts satisfy you always. May you always be captivated by her love.
I love that passage. Isn’t it so simple, really? God simply says to us, “Men, find the girl of your dreams and then devote yourself to making sure she is happy. Now this is from the NLT – the New Living Translation, where it says “Rejoice in the wife of your youth,” in other words continue to enjoy your wife as you grow old together, not “Rejoice in your new and more youthful wife.”
But let’s face it – that simple thing is one of the hardest things for most of us, isn’t it guys? We meet that girl of our dreams, and our intentions are good, but pretty soon this force comes into play that messes up everything we ever venture into. REAL LIFE. Things aren’t always hot and steamy and romantic. The kids come along and are always puking everywhere and sniffling all over our clothes, and we’re not getting as much sleep as we used to – and there are times it seems like that frequent sex we were banking on when we first got married now comes around about as often as Halley’s Comet.
So what do we do, guys? Do we stick it out, make it happen, work those trenches through the long days and weeks when our children are small? Sometimes. But often we check out and begin to find greener pastures at the office. We stay later. We find every reason to stay at work, and every reason to avoid being home. (BTW, ladies, one day I’ll preach a message where we’ll talk about how you sometimes contribute to conditions where guys would rather just not be around – but that’s not today’s message!).
Why do we do this fellas? There are a lot of reasons, some of the best of which Mike eloquently shared with you earlier. But I can give you one good reasons in just one word. Checklist. That’s it. Guys want the checklist. We love to go to the office and start the day with a list of empty checkboxes, then check them off one by one as we go down the list. We feel productive and good about ourselves. We can look back and see how much we have accomplished.
But family life isn’t like that, is it? I mean, when do we get to check the box next to “raise well-adjusted children.” In twenty years, maybe? Or what about the box next to “ensure that wife is maintaining a feeling of deep peace and security.” That’s a lot harder than completing some project at work – it requires more of US – not just more sweat, but more investment of who we are. I mean, holy cow – if we are to accomplish these things we might have to be verbal. We might have to actually dig down and find those foreign things called feelings and figure out how to identify them and then – and this is just terrifying fellas – we might find that it’s important to actually speak those feelings out loud to our wives and kids.
That’s too hard. It’s easier to be angry, or cold and unavailable to our families because we can be superheroes at the office and never have to really let anyone know who we are. But to be a superhero at home – that means we might need to be willing to be vulnerable. And real men aren’t vulnerable, are they guys? Some of us don’t know what a real man is because we weren’t raised by one. We were raised by one of those work-all-the-time and never be available to your family types, so we think that’s manhood. By the way if you are one of these types of men, it’s never too late to change.
There definitely are other reasons why men struggle with workaholism. Our feelings of self-worth tend to be tied primarily to the office and it’s hard to break away from that. Men tend to not feel confident with children at first and bonding may come with much greater difficulty for them. But that task-list – man we just like to be in there checking off those tasks, solving problems, and getting things done. The long, slow process of investing in our wives and children is hard for us to get comfortable with. Fellas, that’s natural and understandable, but we have to be willing to put in the effort! Let’s look at this Biblically for a moment. This is just so easy and straightforward:
1 Corinthians 7:4-5 (NIV)
4 The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband. In the same way, the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife.
5 Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
Now obviously the context for this is sex. Paul is saying husbands and wives, you have no right to deprive each other of sex, of intimacy, for long periods of time. You do not belong only to yourselves – your bodies also belong to one another. Women, maybe some of you need to hear that today. So go for it! Make it happen!
But also – guys, if it’s not happening, if she’s not responding to you physically, we have to look at why. If it is true in terms of sex, that we have no right to deprive one another, wouldn’t it be even truer in terms of our simple physical presence with one another? If a husband’s body belongs also to his wife, does that mean for sex only? Of course not! I mean maybe the wife should actually see him around, be able to talk to him, to know he prioritizes her more than making money, more than checking off tasks.
As much as I’m sure some men would love to make this passage simply about the wife’s duty to put out sex anytime he wants it, as usual it goes far deeper than that. Because if sex is a spiritual act (which it is without question, and is celebrated as such even in pagan religions), then we can safely say that it is not just a wife supplying her body to her husband for sex that is the point, but her actual cooperation with him in what is going on – their enjoyment of this together as two people who both have a stake in what is happening. So likewise we can safely say it is not just a husband supplying his body to his wife for sex (although this idea wouldn’t really bother most men I know!), but his willingness to be present – whether in bed or out of it – to meet her needs – to care for her. But don’t take my word for it:
Ephesians 5:25-31 (NIV)
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her
26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word,
27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church--
30 for we are members of his body.
31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."
So husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. How does Christ love the church? Well, first of all, who is the church? All of us who serve God with our lives, right? How does Christ love the church?
1. With total commitment. (the course of history)
2. With complete selflessness. (the Incarnation)
3. With unconditional availability. (prayer)
4. With unimaginable intensity. (the cross)
I know I will never be able to love Christy with total commitment, complete selflessness, unconditional availability, and unimaginable intensity. Men, you will never be able to love your wife the way Jesus loves the church. But you can aspire to no less. You can have no lower goal than that. So let’s look at a few ways you can know if you are working too much, because more than anything else, that will keep you from loving your wife the way Christ loved the church.
1. Listen to your wife. News flash – her opinion about your schedule matters. Guys, are we called to become one flesh with our boss, or employees, or clients, or creditors? Of course not. You have to earn a living but in the scheme of things, those people don’t matter. But there is one opinion that should matter. And fellas if you think she’s just out to make your life miserable and harass you all the time, I challenge you just to start making occasional efforts to prioritize her and the kids in small ways. You’ll be surprised how quickly she will become more flexible and understanding when you really are in a crisis at work. But you can’t try it for a week and then give up when she isn’t bending. She needs to see this isn’t some gimmick to get what you want, but that it’s coming from a genuine love for her and a desire to really be her partner in her life – not just a cash cow.
2. Look at your schedule. When’s the last time you can find something that says, “Take Jeffrey to school,” or “Take Lisa to the doctor,” or – in my case – “Daddy-Daughter Dance.” In other words, when do your wife and kids get a piece of you? If they rarely do, you are working too much. Allow your wife to have veto power over your schedule. Do it because you love her. Do it because you want to invest in your children. And if you can’t find it in your heart at first to do it for those reasons, do it at first because there’s a good chance it could lead to more sex. It may not be the most noble reason, but if that’s what motivates you at first to do the right thing, then do it.
3. Look back. Your kids are growing up fast. If you spend as much time with them in the next five years as you spent with them in the previous five years, will you know them at all at the end of that time? If not, you’re working too much. Will you be a father, or an acquaintance? The good news is that that is up to you.
4. Listen to your kids. Have they stopped asking you to spend time with them? If so, that’s probably because they have lost hope. And if your kids have lost all hope that you will spend that afternoon, or Saturday, or evening with them, you are definitely working too much.
5. Listen to your colleagues at the office. It’s good to be known as a hard worker, but if everyone knows that of all the people in the office you’re the one who will come in whenever you’re called, you’re the one to call in every pinch, you’re the one who will scale every mountain, you’re working too much. Why would you do those things at work and not do it for your family?
6. Listen to your eulogy.
Carpe diem. Seize the day. Life’s too short to spend it on things that don’t matter – things like making money and being the big man at the office. You will not lay on your deathbed and wish you had spent more time at work. But you will see the faces of your wife and children, and you will measure your ultimate value by how much value you added to the lives of the people you loved the most. If you keep going the way you’re going now, what will your wife and kids have to say about you when you’re gone, other than, “He was a hard worker.”
What if the aim of every husband and father in America were for his wife and kids to be able to say of him when he’s gone, “He was always there when I needed him.” Guys, if we reach that goal then our victories at work will be that much sweeter, because we’ll have a family that loves us and will celebrate with us. But if we fail at home with our families, nothing we accomplish at work will really matter.
I want to continue this topic next week. Today we have looked at how working too much interferes with family. I have focused mostly on men this morning. Next week we’ll look at how working all the time interferes with God’s purposes for our lives and this will apply more to both men and women.
