3We hear this refrain echoing throughout history in the songs we sing,
You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.
When I was in high school Beck wrote a song about working in fast food restaurant andrefrain was,
I ain’t gonna work for no soul suckin’ jerk.
However, good our work may be we have understood implicitly that there remainssomething broken, some curse that continues to roam beneath the surface cropping upwhen we least expect it.How have we approached or acknowledged this curse? We should be clear that work didnot begin with Adam and Eve being kicked out of the Garden. Both God and Adam andEve were at work before they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Whathappened was that our relationships were redefined. We became afraid to be vulnerableor naked before God and each other. The parent-child relationship was marked with painand our relationship to the ground which represented our ability to make a living becamethe setting for struggle and great effort. God made the entire world and called it good butit was in the Garden that all these relationships were in order. Being outside the gardendid not negate the goodness of God but it did signify the brokenness of creation.And so for thousands of years society has raged against our cursed ground hoping thatone day we would gain the upper hand over it. But the ground still offers no guarantees,it has not been worked into submission. As the farmer has no assurance of the crop’sreturn so we also have no promise of permanent job security or that our children willgrow up strong and healthy or that our loved ones will not hurt us. The world around usstill bears the scars of the curse, of broken relationships and leaving us at times in themidst of deep waters.
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