Working like a Hebrew slave

I was standing in line at the post office when I overheard one man greeting another.  "How have you been?" said the first.  "Working like a Hebrew slave," replied the second.  Wow.  Talk about an unexpected response.  I wonder what the man meant when he said that.  The beginning of the book of Exodus tells of the 430 years that the Israelites (the Hebrews) are enslaved to the Egyptians.  Exodus describes the slavery of the Israelites in this way.  "The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and every kind of field labor.  They were ruthless in all the tasks they imposed on them" (Exodus 1:13-14).

How many of us think of work as hard service that is imposed on us and has a tendency to make us bitter?  Few of us would actually use those words to describe the work that we do, but there are responsibilities in every job that we don't choose, that feel imposed on us, and can make us feel bitter at times!  I wonder about the relationship that we have with work in our culture.  Sometimes it is portrayed as the be-all and end-all of our existence.  When you meet someone new, the first question you are often asked after your name is, "And what do you do?"  Meaning, how do you earn a living, how does your job define you, what assumptions can I make about you based on your job title?  At the same time, work is also seen as a drag, something from which we long to escape.  Think about movies like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," how much productive time at work is lost to the Internet, and how much we love long weekends.  We have a paradoxical relationship with work, and yet, God created us to be creatures who need to work in order to thrive.

In the book of Genesis, God created Adam, the first human, and gave him the responsibility of naming the living creatures that God brought into being (Genesis 2:19-20a).  What a great privilege, to think of names for God's creatures!  Work is not supposed to be the drudgery that it so often turns out to be.  Work is meant to be a way that we partner with God in the ongoing creation of the world.  When you engage in conversation with someone, fix something that is broken, make a meal, soothe a child, or teach a class, you are helping to create something that did not exist before you got to work.  You are helping God with the continual work of renewing the world by creating what did not exist before you came.

This is a small snapshot of the way it is meant to be.  God does not intend for anyone to work like a Hebrew slave, expending all of their efforts for a harsh, cruel taskmaster.  Work should be part of our satisfaction in life, a way that we contribute to the world around us, as we are treated fairly and compensated justly for what we do.  Obviously, there are relatively few people in the world who can describe what they do every day as matching up with this idealized picture of work.  There are so many factors that contribute to the kind of work we do--our current life circumstances, whether we work inside or outside the home, if we work for pay, education, constraints on our time, obligations that we must meet in a variety of categories, and whether we are able to find work at all.  And that only scratches the surface of the factors that go into our working lives.

I think about the residents of the prison where I am taking my Biblical Incarceration class.  Last week, one of the women described the variety of job opportunities and work environments within the correctional facility.  She works making license plates for the state DMV.  Other women learn about horticulture or work in the kitchen.  Some have outside jobs.  The highest paid job that this woman mentioned was answering the telephone at the state visitors' bureau.  For that, you can receive up to $3 a day, plus overtime, once you have worked there for a certain amount of time and meet specific conditions.

Three dollars a day.  I consider those wages to be in the "working like a Hebrew slave" category, and most of the jobs described paid far less than that.  Hearing about these kind of experiences certainly gives me a whole new perspective on my work life.  How would you describe your working life?  Does it allow you to make a positive contribution to the world?  Is it a fair working environment where you are justly compensated--financially or otherwise?  How do you balance the ideal description of what work should be with how you actually experience work in your own life?

What is the work that you would most like to do in the world?  If you are not currently engaged in doing it, what is stopping you?  How do you reconcile the ideal with the real when it comes to work?