The Will to Work… and Enjoy It

These words of dedication come from a grateful author: “To my own mother and father and to all parents like them, who have dedicated their lives to providing their children with the world’s best inheritance⎯The Will to work and the Wisdom to Enjoy It.“ And then he adds this observation: “You can’t be miserable as long as you are properly and enjoyably busy; there is no room for misery . . . ”

This thought is further fortified with these words that come from some significant sources: “To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity,⎯what a miserable thing it is! . . . To have all . . . wants satisfied is something intolerable⎯the feeling of stagnation, which comes from pleasures that last too long.” “One must have leisure to be a pessimist; an active life almost always brings good spirits in body and in mind.” To this we would add the voice of Voltaire: “Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing . . . One must give one’s self all the occupation one can to make life supportable in this world . . . The further I advance in age, the more I find work necessary. It becomes in the long run the greatest pleasures, and takes the place of the illusions of life.”

One more witness we would add from a more recent source: “Inactivity, were it only for physiological reasons, is a torment to a healthy human being . . . inactivity speedily becomes a torment as soon as the normal craving for rest and leisure has been satisfied . . .”

Too many times it has been said, but not nearly enough times considering how true it is⎯that the Lord God meant us to earn our way by our own effort. He could have made for us an effortless existence⎯if He hadn’t know that growth and character and competence and satisfaction of should come only with work⎯work that feeds and disciplines and develops and satisfies the spirit, the physical side, the mind and heart of man.

“The outlook for our country” wrote Irwin Edman, “lies in the quality of its idleness . . .” And to this we would add, in the quantity of its idleness also. And we can only say in gratitude thank God for the blessing, for the right, for the privilege, for restoring, healing, peace-giving, satisfying⎯even for the blessed necessity⎯of useful, willing work.