Proverbs 13:4 | All is Well

It’s Saturday night, and I’m sitting here with blisters on my hands and my feet, and a couple of tiny thorns stuck in my thumbs. I’m sore, I’m tired, and I am settled.

It’s been a bit of a discouraging week. And as the week wound down and we approached Friday, I looked longingly at Saturday and made plans to be a slug. To hide, in my house, and pathetically feel sorry for myself.

How embarrassing.

But we do that, don’t we? When we are exhausted, overwhelmed, discouraged, aching–our first response is so often to sit in a corner and lick our wounds. And whine to God–“Why, God? Don’t you see? Don’t you know? Don’t I deserve to sit here and be discouraged? To sit here and hurt?”

Don’t get me wrong; there are certainly plenty of times, in life, when we do need to hide. When we need to seek quiet and solitude and, o my soul, rest–real rest. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. You know that, and I know that.

No, I’m talking about the inward-facing, retrospective, self-centered, cynical, bitter attitude that we all slip into some time. Unfortunately, I know it well.

But something switched in my brain and soul, this morning. It started with scripture work. It wasn’t earth-shattering. It wasn’t “powerful” (cliché) or comforting, but just the act of working through 5 verses, in Isaiah, was not only settling, but it was motivating.

Which then led to a full day of work. Solid, hard, back-breaking, sweat-producing work. Cleaning the house, doing laundry, cleaning at the church (October is my team’s month to do that), cleaning out a friend’s overgrown flowerbeds, trimming bushes, mulching my flower beds, mowing mowing mowing, and then a very long walk.

It was, oh, so very good. So very good.

All of it was good, even the cleaning inside. But it was the outside work, in the warm fall sun, under the blue October sky, that helped reorient my mind and my soul.

Especially the mindlessness of it all. It doesn’t take a rocket science degree, to pull a bunch of bermuda grass out of a flowerbed. It’s repetitive, dirt-ensconced work. I won’t use a metaphor or analogy here about some ridiculous symbolism that can be found in comparing weeds to sin in our lives, although I suppose a more creative person could. But, to me, they were weeds. They needed to be gone. And so I pulled them out. Over and over and over again. And cleared the flowerbed.

Same with mowing. Row after row after row.

And, at the end of the day, when I dragged my sore self, covered in dirt and twigs and chopped up leaves, into the house, there was a true sense of joy.

I suppose it is the joy that comes, from knowing a job has been completed.

And, beyond that, the joy that comes from being outside, where one can breathe and see that the world is so, so, so much larger than I am.

I am small.

I am seen, and known, by God, but I am also so very small under the big, amazing, awe-striking blue sky.

And, there is comfort in that.

It brings to my mind two verses. The first is found in Colossians 3:23-24 ~

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, ²⁴knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.

I love that phrase, “work heartily”. To me, it means to give everything I’ve got. To go until I can’t go another step. To pull weeds until the job is finished. To do my work tasks with enthusiasm and with excellence, to the best of my ability….as for the Lord, and not for men. Not to earn His “approval” or to earn salvation; rather, out of obedience. We are told to work heartily.

Maybe there is a sense in which hard work is also a type of spiritual discipline.

And then, this verse, in Proverbs 13:4 ~

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,
while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.

At first glance, this verse may seem like a pithy little saying–something to spout off to your kid when they are being lazy and not doing their chores.

Oh, but it isn’t a pithy saying. No, it is much more. There is much here.

When I allow myself to sink into slug mode, and into the despondency of self-pity, I find that I crave, and yet those cravings are not met. Cravings for peace, for being settled, for being assured, for being at peace, for so many other things—and yet my soul gets nothing, in those dark slug-like moments, apart from self-loathing. I can even name times when, in selfishly choosing to be a slug, I have craved food, and have eaten far too much, only to find that it did not satisfy. Having the soul of a sluggard is a downward spiral.

But.

When I am diligent to do whatever work is set before me–be it care for others, or my work tasks, or parenting tasks, or responsibilities such as pulling weeds and mowing the grass–O, my soul, it is richly supplied….

….with settled-ness. With joy. With satisfaction of a job well-done. With a good-type of exhaustion, that more readily lends itself to uninterrupted sleep.

And my soul is richly supplied with the peaceful knowledge that the sky is huge, and God is huge, and while I am so small, He knows my name.

I did not want to do work today.

And not just the work that pays the bills and provides for my family. I mean any and all work–the soul work that occurs during prayer and study, the health work that occurs when I stomp around the neighborhood to get 10,000 steps and 5 miles done, the hard work of parenting, the work of cleaning and weeding and calendaring and organizing. None of it. Sinfully, I’m sure. But also weariness.

For several different reasons, I did not want to do the work that this day–that each day–requires. Mind reasons. Soul reasons. Physical reasons.

Fortunately, though, reason and habit won out, and the work got done.

And then, as life would have it, I was reminded three different times today of the value of hard work.

The first came as I stomped (what I do can not, in all seriousness, be called walking. Walking is graceful. I am not.) around the neighborhood this morning. Usually I use that time to think and sort things out, and pray some. This morning, though, the only thing running through my mind was a sort-of mantra: “Do the work. Do the work. Do the hard work. Work hard. Work hard, do you hear me self? Work. Hard.” And, similar to how sometimes just writing out scripture over and over again will start to settle my mind, so does “doing the work”. Sweat equity, I suppose.

Later on in the day, in between work calls and before my crew came home from school, I went outside to knock out some more mileage as a stretching break from the computer and phone. I didn’t get very far, though, because a church member/neighbor was outside, and called me to his yard to chat. Our conversation turned to God, and God’s view of the world, at-large, and God’s view of us, and our view of God. He made a remark along the lines of “you are so strong in spite of everything”, and he asked me how can this be? My response, first and foremost and always and always and always, is that I am standing because of the completely undeserved grace that God has granted. And, of course, the completely undeserved kindness of my church family, other local churches, our school district, and our county that I’ll never be able to repay, though I wish I could.

But I also told him this: there is a kind of salvation in hard work, too. Not salvation that saves the soul from death–not the salvation that only the cross can deliver, but there is a type of salvation. A saving of the mind, if you will, which helps settle the soul. There is something settling in knowing this: “Today I will do hard work. By God’s grace, I will accomplish it. And then, tomorrow, I will get up and do hard work again.”

Interestingly enough, the very same thoughts came to me tonight, while sitting with a church member at the soccer fields, watching our boys play soccer (on opposite teams). As we chatted about normal, every day stuff–kids, soccer, work, church, food–out of the blue she said something, too, along the same lines as my neighbor earlier in the day.

And, for the third time today, sitting by that soccer field, I was reminded of the importance of working hard. And the grace of working hard. Which has led me to writing about it here, because of this: I wonder if it is kind of like what Paul says in 1st Corinthians 15:

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

The first few times I heard or read this passage, my reaction was “Good grief, Paul, that sounds so arrogant…the whole ‘I worked harder than any of them’ bit, is a bit much don’t you think Paul?” It even sounds whiny, to an extent. Maybe I read it that way, though, because I recognize the nearly constant arrogance and sinful pride in my own life. If I had said what Paul said above, it would have been out of pride and arrogance. But I am nearly fully convinced that wasn’t the case with Paul.

Instead, I think that maybe Paul has hit upon something important here.

There is grace in work. There is grace in working hard. There is grace in putting in the long hours doing documentation and hosting meetings for work, in putting in the miles and steps physically, in cleaning the toilet and repairing the van yet again and paying the bills and doing volunteer work. There is grace in chauffeuring children and reviewing homework and listening to your child’s dreams and fears and worries and attending sporting events and concerts and parenting. There is grace in caring well for others through the privilege of sitting with and listening. There is grace in working hard–doing hard work–and then, knowing at the end of the day, that the work that will be there the next day can be counted on. It is trustworthy, reliable, sure and steadfast.

Hard work is kind of like God’s mercies. New every morning. There will be work to do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It is trustworthy. It will not abandon. Hard work will not despise me. There is always work to be done. Brain work, soul work, physical and health work, job related work, parenting work, responsibilities work, organizational work, disciplines work, caring for others work.

And, there will always be grace to be able to do the work.

I find Proverbs 13:4 to be interesting:

The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing,
while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.

I think I find it interesting, because it doesn’t speak of bank accounts or houses and boats and goods and retirement accounts, which is what we most associate with hard work.

No, instead it speaks of the soul.

There is soul work that is done through the hard work of putting one foot in front of the other each and every day. Of doing the tasks laid out before us each and every day. I know the pull to do nothing. I know the pull to hide. I know the pull to just stop. To give up. To quit. To go Home. I know these things well; I knew them even today. I may know them again tomorrow. I hope not, but I may.

And you may, too.

But I also know the settling and grace that infuses hard work. And the reliability of hard work.

I know that, by grace, tomorrow there will be hard work to do, and the grace with which to do it.