Hand to the plow

For what are you working?  What will be the sum total of your career?

I think about that today, because I am preparing to leave – on a Saturday, no less – for another corporate gig.  It feels a bit like a treadmill.

But I think about this frequently, partially because of the painting in my living room.  Entitled “Fall Ploughing,” it is a large rendering by Thomas Garside, a Canadian artist, of a farmer turning over a field.  The painting was commissioned by my grandfather’s workmates as a gift for his retirement.

I didn’t know my grandfather well.  He lived in Montreal and we lived outside of Philadelphia.  We didn’t get together often.  So I don’t know how well the farmer in the painting represented my grandfather’s work ethic.  But I’m struck by the contrast of the single-minded focus of the plowman with such a grand landscape.  He’s heads-down in the work.  Oblivious, at least in that moment, to the beauty around him.

It’s easy to do that.  One day’s problem solving flows into the next.  Our hands are to the plow.  Then somehow, we turn around and we’re looking back on the larger portion of our lives.  But, my, aren’t those rows of overturned dirt straight!

Jonathan Edwards, the great 18^th century preacher, said that our true focus should be living for the eternal purpose for which God made us.  “…it becomes us to make the seeking of our highest end and proper good, the whole work of our lives, to which we should subordinate all other concerns of life. Why should we labor for, or set our hearts on anything else, but that which is our proper end, and true happiness?”

 

I have one other of my grandfather’s retirement gifts.  It’s a small, silver box, heavy in my hand, inscribed with flowing words of gratitude.  But it has ttarnished and spoiled over time.  It’s a good reminder to me of Jesus’s admonition not to lay up treasures on earth, where rust destroys.

So, I am talking to myself today, reminding myself -- even as I climb back on the treadmill, even as I put my hand to the plow once again -- I work for a larger goal.  A greater good.  A glorious God.

Father, I commit to you this work that I do.  It is, mostly, an obvious good in my life.  But I will not lose myself in it for it is only something you have given me to do.  My true purpose is to bring you glory and to enjoy you.  I ask that you would press into my work both your glory and your pleasure.