The opinionator

Today I read an article that was published in the NY Times yesterday by presumably a blogger calling himself opinionator (I'm technologically a bit challenged, the information age proves too much for me to completely wrap my head around but I think that's how it is...)

Anyhow, the header is 'The busy trap' and boy did he get it right, in my opinion.   People have become too busy to live.   Even me, but when I compare myself/ourselves to the city folk who visit us, we seem positively sedentary!   Opinionator made the remark that the 'work' that people find so incredibly compelling to the extent that it governs their every minute of every day where they have to make a long-term appointment before they can sit down with friends for coffee, is something 'they' seem to forget, was invented by God as punishment.

I would like to share some of what I posted in response:

I read your article 'The busy trap'

Firstly I loved it and couldn't agree more. However, God didn't invent work as a means of punishment. I also always believed it to be so, until I moved out of the city (Johannesburg RSA) to a farm 400km away. I don't have lots of money, but I have animals, I have friends, (lots who flee the city weekends to come visit), we ARE busy, but here's the crunch: we always have time, because the time is our own.

Back to God and the work issue. We read that He planted a garden east in Eden, and commissioned man to work in it. Then later He also says to man, 'everything that is in the garden I give you to eat, the seeds and the fruit and the herbs thereof.... will be for you and for the animals for food... " I have had many epiphanies linked to these simple statements.  

   
- He planted a garden, He did not plow, fertilise, rip up and rip out to plant hectares of one thing. It was a whole, containing fruit, seed, and green things for man to eat.

   
- He put man to work in it, before the fall. So working in the garden was a blessing, not a curse.   Garden as in good to eat.  Something of everything.   Edible landscaping as opposed to big agricultre.

   
- He meant for man and animals to eat from the garden... not each other!   Ok I haven't become a vegetarian as a result of this, because that would also be a skewed representation of a lot of other information contained in the Scriptures...  

 

But back to me and my little farm.

I grow vegetables organically, and all together in one large space.

I pasture animals without additional feed and hormones. Yes even my pigs are green pastured.

I supply more than 30 families and one very large rehab centre and a restaurant with eggs, fruit and veg in season. The pastured animals is a new project, and some customers are anxiously awaiting the day they can order meat too.

Bottom line: The farm needs my and FJ's presence 24/7. I am busy. But I am never too busy to see friends, have an evening out, sit down for coffee with my grown kids who also live on the farm with their spouses, take my oldest granddaughter of 5 to the Kruger National park or somewhere else that's nice for a few hours or share hand feeding a new piglet with a two-year old or baby-sit the babies of which there are two.   I am in Eden.

Work was not invented to punish us. Working on a cursed earth is the curse.   But work itself is still a blessing. If it is a curse it is because we have made it so, each one individually in his or her life.

 

Enjoy your life. Every day is worth living, if you don't allow it to pass in a blur of 'busyness'.

Some people get this.   Some people don't.   Won't ever.   Some wish they could.