What’s Driving You?

What’s Driving You?

A house is built by wisdom and becomes strong through good sense. Through knowledge its rooms are filled with all sorts of precious riches and valuables.

Proverbs 24:3-4

Back in the 1950s, with prosperity on the rise and automated machines entering the workplace, experts warned of an excess of free time. They thought Americans, with computers and other gadgets of convenience, were headed into a time of less work and more leisure. Sociologists even founded an institute to prepare for the dangerous glut of leisure time they envisioned.

Well, society’s fortune-tellers couldn’t have been more wrong. Today’s workforce puts in long, hard hours. Since 1973, the typical adult’s leisure time has shrunk by 40 percent—from twenty-six to sixteen hours a week in 2008.^a Work is consuming. We complain about them, but only a minority of us say we could do without our jobs. Not just because we need the money, but because we like them.

Our desire to work fills weekends, the traditional time for leisure and recuperation, with more work: catching up on chores and errands.

Ask anyone what most robs their marriage of time together and you will likely hear a one-word answer: work. Why do we allow work to steal our time together? Experts point out that we often mistake what we do with who we are. We hang our worth and significance on our work.

When I (Les) was training as a medical psychologist, a highly respected scientific thinker gave a lecture for the hospital interns. I don’t remember much of the lecture, but I will never forget what he said near the end:

I was asked to speak to you on my most recent findings and I have done that. Now let me tell you young doctors what I wish someone would have told me when I sat where you are. You can save yourself unnecessary frustration in the course of your careers if you ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing. For more than thirty years I have struggled and strained to make an impact in my field, and some would say I have.

The room was still as he continued. “But only recently have I learned that I cannot measure my self-worth by the number of articles I publish or the number of people who applaud my findings.” That was it. He gathered his lecture notes and sat down. As his mini message sank in, he obviously had touched a nerve with us hard-driving students.

In his book Ordering Your Private World, pastor Gordon MacDonald writes, “A driven person is usually too busy for the pursuit of ordinary relationships in marriage or family, not to speak of one with God.”^b So what’s driving you? Why are you working so hard? Maybe it’s time to cash in on all your hard work and spend a little extra time together.

Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest.

—Laurence Sterne

^a 103

^b 104