We continue this week with Part 5 in our series, The Discipline of Work, from Elisabeth’s book, The Joyful Surrender. We conclude our series next week with our final installment.
Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.
I never appreciated the tremendous therapeutic value of work until I lost my first husband. Since then I have been asked dozens of times, “How did you ever bring yourself to go back to the jungle?”
I doubt that I could have. I did not “go back.” I stayed. There was work to be done, lots of work, and there was nobody else todo it. Every day, from the first day following the final news that five men were dead, was packed with duties. My baby, my house, an airstrip to maintain, Indians to teach and employ and visit and inject and advise and help, translation work and correspondence filled the time I might otherwise have used to feel sorry for myself. My second husband’s death, a long and agonizing process, made me unutterably grateful to God for plain, ordinary housework. It was just cooking for Addison—and racking my brains to come up with menus he would be able to enjoy at least a little bit—and cleaning and washing his dishes arid clothes and sheets, carrying trays, keeping track of his medicines and answering his letters that got me through. I would find myself thanking God for a pile of dishes or laundry.
It is the one for whom a job is done who gives it its meaning. . .Even when he was at his worst and I was barely able to get through a day, the work was there, and by the grace of God I did it. When I remembered to look up instead of around me and to offer the work to the Lord, it was much easier and more pleasant.
**Excerpt originally published in Joyful Surrender, pp.125-126