Collaborating with God
"I've got the Monday morning blues," we sometimes say in a melancholy tone of voice. It is a common human experience. But after enjoying the refreshment that the rest and worship of Sunday brings, we should be eager for the beginning of the working week. We should exclaim in the words of Mark Greene's well-known book, Thank God It's Monday!
What we need is an authentic Christian philosophy of work. Too many Christians see their work as no more than a painful necessity, since we have to earn our living somehow. By contrast, I think we should imagine Adam (evidently a Neolithic farmer) going to work each day in the Garden of Eden with energy and enthusiasm. For God put the man he had made into the garden he had planted, in order 'to work it and take care of it' (2:15). Thus God deliberately humbled himself to need Adam's cooperation. Of course, he could have done all the work himself. After all, he had planted the garden. So presumably he could have managed it too! But he chose not to.
I like the story of the Cockney gardener who was showing a clergyman around his magnificent herbaceous borders, which were in full bloom. The clergyman broke into the praise of God, until the gardener was fed up that he was receiving no credit. 'You should 'ave seen this 'ere garden,' he complained, 'when Gawd 'ad it to 'isself!' His theology was entirely correct. Without the human worker, the garden would have been a wilderness.
We need, then, to make an important distinction between nature and culture. Nature is what God gives us; culture is what we make of it (agriculture, horticulture, etc.). Nature is raw materials; culture is commodities prepared for the market. Nature is divine creation; culture is human cultivation. God invites us to share in his work. Indeed, our work becomes a privilege when we see it as collaboration with God.
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