When you take your identity, value, and purpose from work, you will often neglect the people in your life in pursuit of what you believe to be a nobler calling. But it is not. You are simply satisfying yourself at the expense of those around you.
More directly, you are neglecting the eternal for what is temporal. For only spirits live beyond the grave, and it is the spirit that is our life.
This thought came to me as I pondered a friend, who has undertaken a grand endeavor, a monumental task, and how I sense this vast wall of separation between us because of it. It is a wall I cannot scale. From the friend’s side, it is a holy wall. An important wall. None should dare scale it, for building it is the highest priority. (In truth, the friend is sold in slavery to it by debt, and that rabbit trail leads a thousand ways to one dark hole.)
I knew this wall as a child. My dear father built one. He called it providing for his family and in reality it was also called: getting ahead, keeping up with the pals who had more toys like snowmobiles and 4-wheelers and tractors and boats and motorcycles. So off he went to work each day before the dawn and home he came at night, drained and empty as the darkness grew upon our home.
Penned inside the house with unruly kids, my mother grew cranky, and so were we. Dad gave us time on Sundays, for he was a church goer, and that often meant there were hikes in the woods after church, or a picnic and a drive. Some evenings, he taught his boys some carpentry, and, at my plea, took me hunting. But those times were precious as found coins; miracles of sharing doled out as if the cupboard would go bare were more passed all around.
Of course, most have to work. It gives us money to eat and live. We need the fulfillment of achievement. These thoughts are meant to ask: How full is your cupboard?
How would the people in your life answer?
Not a one of us runs out of love if that is what our spirit serves. But serve work, serve identity, serve Purpose and you will find there’s not much left to go around.
The Agony of Victory 