A Contemplation of Work, Rest, and the Schedule

by Deborah Chu

“Burning the midnight oil.” “Burning the candle at both ends.” Or to put these sayings into modern terms: “pulling an all-nighter.” Phrases such as these roll into our daily conversations as easily as melting wax rolls down the sides of a candle. In our culture that values high productivity, speed, and instant results, deprioritizing sleep, rest, and self-care has become common. In college especially, where we control our schedules and find ourselves exposed to many exciting opportunities and experiences, biting off more than we can chew becomes disturbingly easy—at the expense of our sleep and well-being.

This spring semester, I find my schedule overloaded yet again and an impending sense of burnout threatens me. This repeating cycle in my life leads me to contemplate a few questions: In a competitive environment where the driving philosophy is productivity and quantity and accomplishments measure individual worth, is there a better way to approach our time and schedules? How can we respond to pressure to meet the increasingly unattainable standards that society sets for us, and should we take the liberty to take control of our lives and schedules independent of external pressures? What do God and the Bible say about work, rest, and our schedules, and to what extent do they compel us to strive for excellence?

In approaching these questions, I think we should start with what God’s word says about our bodies. Paul writes, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) First, Paul states that the human body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Temples are holy and sacred places of worship and communion, and hence they need to be maintained and cared for properly. Our bodies being temples for God himself in the form of the Holy Spirit entails that we must maintain and take care of our bodies to keep them holy and fitting for the Holy Spirit to dwell and work within us. Maintenance includes acts of self-care such as eating and drinking well, avoiding harmful substances for our bodies, nurturing our minds and exercising our bodies, and obviously, learning how to sleep and rest well.

Paul also says we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God because he bought us and our salvation with the price of his blood, saving us from eternal death and separation from the Father. In our lives, we treat gifts from others with love, and we take care to return items to their owners in their original state- or even better condition. Hence, why should we not handle ourselves with the same love and carefulness since we belong to God? With this view, sufficient rest and sleep become an indispensable priority within our schedules for obeying the wishes of our heavenly Father who gives us such commands for our own sake.

Furthermore, God built an inherent schedule for the world during Creation. The very first chapter of the Bible states, “And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” (Genesis 1:3-5) One of God’s first actions is to establish a distinction between day and night. This distinction confirms that day and night are fundamentally different and have different uses. From our natural capacities and inabilities such as our lack of nocturnal vision, we can infer that the day should be utilized for hard work, and night for a time of rest.

God also creates the Sabbath day, on which even He rests during Creation. He goes as far as to call the Sabbath day holy, commanding, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.” (Exodus 20:8-10) God does not need rest as He is omnipotent, however, He sets a precedent for us very clearly in taking rest from His work.

God has differentiated time for us to get our crucial sleep and rest. If he intentionally set aside time in the form of “night” in the schedule of the Earth, he makes it quite clear that we should use this time to sleep and rest. Nature itself decrees that we rest and sleep at night, yet human innovation has defied even this guideline with the inventions of electricity and technology. Even with this reality, we should still make it a priority to protect ample time for rest and sleep within our daily schedules since this is what God intended for humankind and our own good.

This then raises the question of balance. Should we even value work at all if rest and taking care of ourselves are so important? If work is valued, how can we justify the lost time and work that prioritizing rest will cause in our schedules?

The answer to the first question is a simple yes. God does validate work as important and good. He condemns laziness, ordering that we use our time productively. In Proverbs, he provides a myriad of verses addressing laziness, including: “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.” (Proverbs 10:4) Interestingly, one of God’s first instructions to Adam is to work: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” (Genesis 2:15) The rest of the Bible is filled with wisdom about rising early at dawn to make the most of the day and other instructions on being productive.

Clearly, God is not saying that work itself is inherently bad; instead, it’s a good and noble tool that gives us purpose and goals for our lives, as well as a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. However, work is meant to serve us. The inverse is false: we are not meant to serve work. This means that we should not need to subscribe to the ideology of “workaholism” or accept losing sleep to get ahead as a new “normal” in our lives as much of the world has already done. We do not need to embrace the grind-till-dawn lifestyle as a norm of college life. This sometimes means that we need to say “no” to adding new activities to our schedules, even if they are amazing opportunities. I have had to realize that it is sometimes more beneficial to let go of such amazing opportunities so that I can work in moderation and provide myself with much-needed time to rest and nurture my soul.

Answering the second part of my question, I would argue that creating more time for rest and sleep increases our productivity, although it may decrease the time we have to work. When we are better rested, our ability to concentrate on work efficiency and quality both improve, thus heightening our productivity. Furthermore, God should be the motivation for our work: Without Him, all of our work is as pointless as the act of chasing the wind. As Solomon in Ecclesiastes states, “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” (Ecclesiastes 2:17) The Bible further makes a point by declaring “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for he grants sleep to those he loves,” (Psalms 127:2) noticeably emphasizing God-given sleep as a reward and the fruitlessness of our toiling without God’s support.

This Psalm recognizes my personal struggles to find purpose. Multiple times this year, exhaustion has forced me to stop and contemplate what the end of all my striving is. Every day presents a full schedule and endless activities, and I cannot help but wonder if any of it has any purpose. I may feel productive in the moment and rack up a list of impressive achievements in this life, but at the end of the day, many of these will hold no importance or meaning when my life ends. Without the presence of God or the existence of eternity, my life becomes a hamster wheel in which I run myself to exhaustion every day. If I fail to inscribe my name in the annals of man’s finite history, my death can only lead to oblivion. Not the brightest reality, but seemingly the reality I live in at the University of Texas.

However, God takes this bleak monotony and breathes purpose into my work and striving. Colossians 3:23 states “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” The Lord encourages and validates excellence and hard work, and furthermore, he lifts the burden of striving for the fickle approval of fellow man. As God now serves as my main motivation for working, rather than acquiring the approval of man or accomplishing success, I have finally learned about the value of adhering to His guidelines for work, which include proper rest.

As for the hyper-competitive environment we currently live in, the Bible has one solution: “Don’t compare yourself with others. Just look at your own work to see if you have done anything to be proud of. You must each accept the responsibilities that are yours.” (Galatians 6:4-10) What an antidote to the immense pressure we face as small parts of a fast-paced consumer society. Instead of succumbing to the urge to rank our work and worth by the undulating standard of our surroundings we just need to focus on elevating the quality of our work to the best it can be.

However, the obliteration of comparison should not prevent us from putting forth our best foot. God still charges us with accepting the “responsibilities that are yours.” Our world functions around rankings: class rankings, top company rankings, and even government evaluations. These hierarchies remain in the foremost part of our minds and vision boards. Yet, when stripped down to the core, these rankings are all man-made constructions created to satisfy the human need for structure and power. However, God transcends such human structures. Hence our worldview can also transcend such limited constructions to the ever-expansive perspective of eternity. We can operate on a whole new playing field when it comes to work, and in fact, should aim to exist on this plane, for as Paul states in Galatians 1:10, “For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

God’s words, actions, and creation fuse together to point us toward rest and peace. Simultaneously, they compel us to strive for excellence and responsibility in our work for the sake of perpetuating the Lord’s work throughout our world. Embracing the eternity-mindset instead of limiting ourselves to a human time span enables us to realize that in the scope of forever, our physical work is less relevant than the ultimate purpose we have been called to. Hence we can spare ourselves time in our schedules to rest and revel in the Lord. In the words of the famous hymn by Helen Lemmel, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.”