The COVID Curriculum
Work! COVID-19 has thrust this four-letter word front and center onto the global stage. A Google search on “unemployment” returned 161 million results; “employment” more than 2 billion. Jobs—or the lack of them—have caught everyone’s attention.
Will this global pause upgrade how we think and talk about work? Could all the pain steer us to a new way of looking at how we normally spend the bulk of our waking hours? If so, what lessons might the curriculum offer?
Work is God’s Good Gift
God programmed work into the DNA of life on earth. He himself worked (Gen. 2:2-3). So you and I, made in his likeness, also work. When God stated his reason for creating us, he said he made us for the work of ruling—serving as property managers over his earthly real estate (Gen. 1:26).
The Fall dealt work a crippling blow. The thorns and thistles of Genesis 3 have metastasized into new but still-painful forms in today’s workplaces. Before the pandemic, many saw work as an unwelcome interruption to life. Gallup polls say just over one-third of U.S. employees are engaged with their work. That leaves nearly two-thirds not engaged or actively disengaged. Some have seen work as an insult. The last panel of a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip captures this work-averse attitude, when Calvin says, “Why should I have to work for everything? It’s like saying I don’t deserve it!”
Yet working itself—rooted in the action of the good God—remains as one of his major ways of blessing us. Will being locked out of our shops and offices during the crisis remind us of the honor and dignity of working?
Work Sustains Life on God’s Earth
Shortages—from toilet paper to Tylenol—remind us how much we all depend on the work of those made in God’s image. “Work,” writes Lester DeKoster, “is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others.” DeKoster served as the Director of the Calvin College and Seminary Library. The pandemic has demonstrated that usefulness in many ways:
Since the shutdown, many have generously come to the rescue of those unable to feed themselves and their families. Where do those free sacks of food come from? From the work of farmers, food processors, truckers, and bag-manufacturers.
To cushion the financial blow created by the crisis, the U. S. government has sent checks to the nation’s households. But where does that money come from? From the salaries and wages of people who work and pay taxes.
Those infected with the virus have put an extra-heavy burden on hospital workers and first responders. Where do their masks, gloves, gowns, goggles, vaccines, swabs, ventilators, and so forth come from? From the skills and efforts of those whose work produces them.
After the coronavirus crisis no longer dominates the news, will we recall how God, through human work, makes it possible for plant, animal, and human life to flourish here on his earth?
Unworking Destroys Lives
Yes, the coronavirus is deadly. But its presence confronts us with the fact that unworking is also deadly. Writing in Psychology Today, Glenn Sullivan says, “Unemployment is a well-established risk factor for suicide. In fact, 1 in 3 people who die by suicide are unemployed at the time of their deaths. For every one-point increase in the unemployment rate, the suicide rate tends to increase .78 points. One of the silent drivers of our current suicide crisis is the high percentage of working-age men not participating in the labor force.”
In his 2015 book, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, Nicholas Eberstadt reports that, “By 2015, the number of prime-age inactive men was over 7 million—6.5 times higher than it had been a half-century earlier.” Eberstadt calls this species of male, “The un-working American man.” And all this work-shirking was taking place well before the coronavirus crisis struck the planet.
As I write this, the official unemployment rate listed by the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is 14.7 percent. No one knows how much COVID-19-related joblessness may contribute to depression, divorce, bankruptcy, or suicide. But after the current crisis subsides, will we better appreciate why Paul worked at making tents to provide “a model” for the Thessalonian Christians to follow (II Thess. 3:9)? And will we more fully understand why he wrote “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat” (v. 10)?
Work Maintains the World’s Economy
Coronavirus headlines warn of how the pandemic has created economic chaos. For many Christians, the economy may seem completely unrelated to anything spiritual. But as Darrow L. Miller reminds us in Lifework: What You Do Every Day, “The passages on business and economics” in the Bible are “far more numerous than those on spiritual salvation.” Salvation, he says, “is fundamental to everything else.” But “God is interested in economics and has given us first principles to help us steward creation and promote healthy economic activity.”
When we steward the earth, we multiply the value of the raw materials God packed into it for the benefit of those who live in it. Such activity is oikonomia, a Greek word in the New Testament that speaks of responsibilities relating to managing and organizing. From oikonomia we get our English term, “economy.” Darrow continues, “Economics, therefore, could be said to be the wise management of God’s household (the world) with moral imagination, or to put it another way, the stewardship of resources within the boundaries of God’s laws.”
As the world recovers financially from the current crisis, will we have learned the lesson that concern for the economy honors God?
Work Should Not Divide Us
During the shutdown we’ve been hearing the adjective “essential” used to modify “work.” I spoke this week to a physical therapist whose hospital, during the shutdown, reassigned her to work in its supply chain, where she “did a lot of counting.” Previously she had seen her job as ministry. Now, though, she sees that “the invisible people who support those of us who work in direct care are also in a ministry. . . . It is true that all jobs in the hospital are essential. It's sometimes easy to lose sight of that.”
The idea that only some are “essential workers” signals that the work of others must be “non-essential.” How easily the careless use of vocabulary about work can divide us. Long before anyone heard of COVID-19, we used other divisive terms about work. Blue collar jobs versus white collar careers (with the implication that the one out-ranked the other). Manual work versus mental work (suggesting that you can work with your hands without using your head).
But the world’s culture is not the only source of work-related divisiveness. Church traditions, too, have long split Christians into two camps. Those who do “spiritual” or “sacred” work include pastors, missionaries, worship leaders, and the like. Those in “secular” work repair cars, write software, design buildings, and so on. This encourages people in “lower-tier” work to simply mark time until retirement when they can finally devote their hours to doing something they see as spiritually significant.
Jesus and Paul, his hand-picked representative, both saw division as unthinkable among Christians. After this crisis, will we who follow Jesus stop using divisive word-wedges that lift some up and put others down on the basis of the work they do?
COVID’s course was not an elective. But an open heart and mind can learn from even the harshest instructor. After we graduate, how many lessons will we remember and put into practice?