"I don't smoke and never have, but many of my relatives did. Perhaps that is why I can remember so many old cigarette commercials. I wanted to see how they were tricked in to burning up their money.
"Do you remember the Pall Mall ad? As I recall it went something like this: 'Over, under, around, and through, Pall Mall travels pleasure to you.'
"Over, under, around, and through. That actually has application to workaholics, who seemingly always have too many responsibilities. There is always another job to do, another call to make, or another job to redo better.
"If anyone in Scripture looked like a workaholic, it was the apostle Paul....Yet it was the apostle Paul who wrote, 'One thing I do.'
"Today we say, 'These twenty things I dabble in.' Remember the phrase 'Jack of all trades, master of none.' I found that to be a misquote from a phrase of early American history: 'Jack of all trades, master of one.'"
adapted from: Time Out. Daily Devotions for Workaholics by Gary E. Hurst, Mike Kachura, and Larry D. Sides, February 11
2 comments:
I have a couple of workaholic friends who would admit to having convinced themselves that their jobs (the company they work for) would fall apart without them. When I push them on this assumption they ignore the fact that life goes on whether or not they are involved. I see this in alot of clergy too. The common phrase is, "If I don't do it, it won't get done". My answer: it probably shouldn't be done in the first place then. People don't like to hear that they can't and shouldn't do everything.
It's too bad because the families always suffer...
Here's a quote from Eugene Peterson:
"Sabbath is not a day off and it is inexcusable that pastors, learned in Scripture and guardians of the sacred practices, should so misname it. 'A day off' is a bastard sabbath. Days off are not without benefits, to be sure, but sabbaths they are not. Pastors are often persuaded by wives, husbands, children, and psychiatrists to interrupt their obsessive-compulsive seven-day week by taking a day off. They are often pleased with the results: they get more done on the six days than they used to on seven. Mind and body are not constructed for perpetual motion. Mental and physical health improve markedly with a day off. We feel better. Efficiency sharpens. Relationships improve. However beneficial, this is not a true sabbath but a secularized sabbath. The motivation is utilitarian: the day off is at the service of the six working days... Sabbath means quit. Stop. Take a break. Cool it. The word itself has nothing devout or holy in it. It is a word about time, denoting our nonuse of it, what we usually call wasting time." (Working the Angles, p. 66, 67)
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