by Emily Vickery
There is a weariness that lies just this side of burnout—the kind that weighs down your soul and takes up residence in your bones. It is the companion of middle-of-the-night nursery trips, early morning wake-up calls, and long days with longer to-do lists. It sits up with you at night as you finish that one final task and greets you in the morning as you rush out the door with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee. It evidences itself in hunched shoulders or a creased brow, and, at times, it seems that this weariness will be a constant throughout your adult life.
On your weariest of days, you may be tempted to throw up your hands and whisper (for a shout takes more effort than you can afford to expend), “It’s not supposed to be this hard!”
Or perhaps, if your particular brand of weariness is a bit more spiritually mature than my own, you may murmur a prayer, asking the Lord, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way, was it?”
Was it?
A (Brief) Theology of Work
Contrary to what our weary hearts may tell us, work is not a post-Fall punishment. Rather, it was a pre-Fall privilege, a calling for all of humanity before sin ever entered God’s perfectly created order. In the Creation Mandate (Genesis 1:28), Adam and Eve (and their future descendants) were called by God to act as vice-regents over all His creation, filling and subduing the earth with godly offspring and good cultural practices. All worthy vocations, whether secular or sacred, fall into these parameters of filling and subduing the earth that were given to the earliest of earth’s occupants.
While this good work existed prior to humanity’s Fall, work, like everything else in this world, has been touched and made less than perfect by sin. Adam is told in Genesis 3:17–19 that he will toil over the earth to produce the food that had been graciously provided in Eden, working “by the sweat of his brow” to continue his task of cultivating the soil. While work can still bring joy and fulfillment, it will also bring fatigue, frustration, and sometimes head-hunched weariness.
We are not told explicitly in Scripture what sort of work capacity Adam and Eve had in the Garden. We do not know how often they needed rest or sleep; there are no references to a first family “work-life balance.” However, what we are given in the Creation account is a model for the rhythm of labor.
In God’s very own creative work, we see the need for humans to rest and sabbath, both daily and weekly. Each evening, God would stop to take account of His labor and pronounce it good. The implication is that He is resting, if even for a moment, each day. And, on the seventh day of Creation’s first week, God Himself rested for a full day to give us an example of the importance of extended rest in our own, much smaller creative works.
Even in the perfect world God intended, rest was expected and encouraged. We were never meant to feel we could sustain all of creation in our own finite power. Perhaps one of the graces of work that we often overlook is its ability to remind us of our finite vulnerabilities. The strain of our labor quickly brings us back to our reliance on a perfect, omniscient Creator God, Who sustains us in the work to which He has brought us each day. And perhaps one of the harshest realities of our post-Fall world is the imperfect nature of the rest we do manage to snag for ourselves between tasks or at the end of each day.
It seems that we now vacillate between two extremes in our attitudes toward work. On one side of the spectrum, individuals idolize their work—or their own capacity for productivity. They make themselves to be gods who they mistakenly believe are responsible for keeping the world, or their corner of it, in order. These individuals may ignore God’s commands to rest or minimize the need for His sustaining grace in each day’s efforts. Others may tend toward the opposite extreme of laziness and sloth, ignoring the commands of Scripture to do all things as unto the Lord and instead choosing to make their desire for rest or pleasure king. Neither of these extremes are what the Lord intends, and neither option will bring us to a true sense of fulfillment, purpose, or joy.
Hope for Something Better
Knowing our tendencies toward imperfect work and rest, how do we combat weariness when even our best efforts at finding a Biblical, God-honoring balance seem to result in more tasks for tomorrow or continued weariness for today? Thankfully, God in His kindness did not leave these questions unanswered for us. His Word bids us come to Him and rest, learning from Christ as we follow Him. While He commands us to take up our cross, He promises that He has done the same. In following Him, we can be assured that He has gone before us, and He knows the way through the pains of labor. He accomplished all the work set before Him. Christ alone was able to say, “It is finished,” of the task we could never accomplish ourselves.
We will never overcome weariness in our work in our own power, in the same way we cannot accomplish all we hope to do in our own strength. However, we have been given a Helper to work in and through us. The constant presence of God’s Spirit within the believer can keep him or her from idolizing work or rest. He gives us strength to accomplish the work He has given us and reminds us that we could not accomplish this task if left to our own devices. We find God’s intended balance as we give our best efforts toward our work and then trust His power to accomplish all we cannot as we take needed rest. Both our efforts and our rest may be marred by the effects of the Fall, but, through God’s redemptive work, we can see beautiful and meaningful things come from both.
Beyond the great grace of God’s presence in us, we have also been given the hope of a promised future rest. Skye Peterson and Kristyn Getty explain this hope in this way:
When the labors of this fleeting life are done
As the shadows fall, we’ll see the lights of home.And then all our prayers and troubles will be stories of the past –
Safe within His gates, we’ll find our rest.[1]
While we are not there yet, we can work confidently in the task that Isaiah gave those awaiting the Messiah’s first arrival so many years ago:
Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who have an anxious heart, “Be strong; fear not!
Behold, your God will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God. He will come and save you” (Isaiah 35:3–4).
The greatest balm to our weary hearts is the reminder that this current reality is not all there is. We have the power of the Spirit and the promise of a coming perfect rest to sustain our labors in the here-and-now. God has come to save us from sin, and He will one day put all things to rights. We will then find true rest that dwells alongside perfect labor. We may be weary as we journey, but we can be joyful because home is the destination that awaits us at this journey’s end.
There is a weariness that lies just this side of burnout. But there is a hope that sits with it as well. Hope to sustain us, hope to lift our weary heads. This hope sits with us as we fret and waits for us to remember our promised end. Though it cannot take the weariness away completely, our hope helps us see past it, knowing our present reality will one day be behind us, and we will rest at home with the One who has finished the most important work for us.
“Look up,” hope whispers. “See the joy set before you. Your God will come. And He will give you rest.”
About the Author: Emily Vickery lives with her husband, Zach, in Pleasant View, Tennessee. She has a B.S. in Psychology from Welch College and an M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of the Cumberlands. She works at Welch College as the Academic Office Manager. When she isn’t chasing down her son, Jack, she enjoys reading, playing the piano, and cheering on her favorite sports teams with her husband.
[1] Skye Peterson, Kristyn Getty, and Ben Shive, “Take Shelter,” 2022.
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