Paul Poulton considers a healthy work/life balance

Paul Poulton

Earlier this week at breakfast my son was telling me that he thought he could probably do better in his school exams. I said, "Probably do better? If you could then you should".

That began an interesting discussion about laziness. I said laziness is a vice and the opposite of laziness is hard work which is a virtue. Isaac, my son, said, "If you take any virtue to the extreme it becomes another vice". I thought about what he had said for some time after I'd dropped him off at school that morning and I came to the conclusion he was right.

I guess the concept of a Sabbath day of rest was far more than just a pleasant surprise for the Israelite slaves. It was probably amazing to them. Their former employers, the Egyptian slave drivers, must have had them working 7 days a week 365 days a year. When the Israelites union spokesperson, Aaron, suggested to Pharaoh that the Israelite workers should take a three day rest to hold a festival, he was hopping mad and said, "Why are you taking the people away from their labour?" So when the Israelites finally broke free and heard the concept of having a day off once a week, it must have sounded like all their birthdays had come at once, well, once a week.

There's a verse in Exodus that explains why we have a day off. It says, "So that your ox and donkey and the servant born in your house, and the alien as well, may be refreshed." It was a message to employers to give their workers at least one day off a week. Of course, now it's accepted practice that workers shouldn't have to work seven days a week, which is good. But the onus now turns away from the employers to the employees, because we now find that a temptation has arisen to indulge in the 'rest' more than we should. After work, rest is certainly pleasurable, and the vice of laziness gets its grip when we want to hang onto that pleasure longer than is warranted. But work can also be pleasurable, I enjoy recording in the studio, and there is always that temptation to stay longer. There are rock'n'roll stories about famous musicians who have worked longer than a week in the studio without even stopping to sleep. It's in that context that what my son said made sense to me. We sing Roy Wood's great Christmas song each year, "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday". It's a great song and it's fun singing it sometimes with my band at Christmas gigs, but if for one minute we thought about the consequences of taking its hook line literally then Christmas day would soon turn into hell on earth.

We like the feeling of resting but it only works as God intended if it is preceded by work. If we work and never stop we become a workaholic, who lives to work rather than works to live, but if we are work-shy we become the sluggard the book of Proverbs warns us about; he is so lazy he won't go out of his house because there may be a fierce lion in the street. Yeah, right! If we are lazy we even have a cute animal named after us, it's called the sloth.

So what are we allowed to do on a day of rest? The Israelites began to acquire quite a lot of rules about that very subject, such as a 'Sabbath day's journey'; the length of which varied from time to time but was never very far. There were other rules too, like a man could not wear a shoe that had its sole nailed on, but could wear a stitched shoe. One man could carry a loaf of bread but two men could not. Putting out a fire was not allowed, nor carrying items from your home, which could be a problem if your house was on fire. If your house was on fire then you could carry food out of the house, but only enough to get each member of the family through the rest of the Sabbath. You could not carry clothes out of the house, but you could wear as many clothes as you could fit on.

The historian Josephus, mentions some people were so holy, that on the Sabbath day they won't even use the toilet, because on the Sabbath one can't go outside the settlement. Plus there's the tricky question about digging on the Sabbath because Moses said, 'Dig a hole and cover up your excrement'. Of course all these rules begin to negate what the day of rest is there for. Jesus cuts right through all these rules by saying, 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.'

One proverb says, 'The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; but is so lazy he will not even bring it back to his mouth'! Okay it's using exaggeration to make a point, but it's a good point. Muscles atrophy when laziness gets a hold on a person and the more it gets a hold the harder it becomes to break out of because the lazy person is becoming weaker and hard work becomes even harder than it was before. Laziness actually inhibits life in more ways than one.

Busy people need to take care also; there is a time for every activity under heaven. We can get used to having a finger in so many pies that the busy person becomes a busybody. Solomon has a neat way of saying the same thing, 'Do not be over-righteous...why destroy yourself? Do not be over-wicked and do not be a fool - why die before your time?'