Famous

Yup - I know someone who's now, as my husband said "a little bit famous." Just after we travelled to Princeton, an article by a friend with whom we visited hit the web on a fairly well read blog. It is a good article, well worth reading. It is entitled Human Flourishing. Let me share a couple brief quotes to whet your appetite . . . .

From the introduction:

This essay proposes that living as a Christian, an alternative to the prevailing culture, leads to flourishing. First, I briefly sketch what the worldly culture of busyness looks like. I then discuss how our modern notions about the nature of work and success create the culture of busyness and keep it going. Finally, I attempt to show how the Christian faith offers an alternative way to understand work and success that, when believed and lived out, results in joy, peace, and genuine flourishing instead of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion.

From the section on work (in particular how we value it):

Another benefit from rightly valuing all types of work connects to the fact that most students will one day become parents. So many people, and especially women, struggle when they finish years of education, work in a particular job for a time, and then leave their jobs to stay home to parent small children and run their households. Many wrestle with a deep sense that when they do this, they are throwing their lives away. They cannot appreciate that the different work of running a household and caring for those who cannot care for themselves is legitimate and valuable work. They cannot grasp the notion that the work for their family, which does not bring in a paycheck, might even be more important than what they were doing before. Our hierarchy of work has destructive implications in many directions, family life included.

And from the section on Depending on God in our Work (relating to taking time off to rest from our work):

I believe we would be greatly aided in living out our actual dependence upon God (which, like the Israelites in the wilderness, we all too easily forget) if the body of Christ today would make Sabbath-keeping a priority....

For students who are preparing for an unknown career in an unknown place, it is such a challenge not to think that you have to work hard to craft your future by working in the present. But with a weekly day of rest, we can take the focus off of ourselves and place it back, rightfully, on God. Marva Dawn writes [p.24 in Keeping the Sabbath Wholly],

In our twentieth-century spirituality we easily lose the notion of God’s provision for us because of our advanced civilization and its distance from the actual processes that provide material goods. A major blessing of Sabbath keeping is that it forces us to rely on God for our future. On that day, we do nothing to create our own way. We abstain from work, from our incessant need to produce and accomplish, from all the anxieties about how we can be successful in all that we have to do to get ahead. The result is that we can let God be God in our lives.

We can train ourselves, like the Israelites feeding on manna, to be confident that God is providing for us today and will surely provide for us tomorrow. . . . Sabbath-keeping does not have to be rigidly observed on Sunday. Rather, the point is to cultivate a weekly time of rest, which includes ceasing from work and worship of God as a pattern of life. . . . It will take courage for a student to observe a weekly Sabbath. Students who choose Sabbath-rest will see other students studying and working hard for the week ahead and will be tempted to work like everyone else. Those ceasing from work will have to remind themselves that God is with them in their studies and is working on their behalf for their future, so they can trust him by not going to the library. Some students will likely fall behind their peers who press ahead every day of the week, and they will have to make peace with this reality. Embracing this weakness and making room for God to show forth his strength in their lives will be hard. So I recommend that students ask for encouragement and accountability from their peers to press on in their Sabbath-observance because it will be much easier to keep a Sabbath if there are other believers to keep a Sabbath with. But I think the tremendous benefits of peace, trust in God, and growth in serving others will be worth the challenges.