I have a family member who loves to work in his large vegetable and flower garden. He talks about needing "garden time." I would say that is his "therapy." Working, laboring, for a purpose can bring great inner satisfaction. To work on a job worth doing is to achieve a job well done. Just the sheer physicality of hard work produces job satisfaction. From my Jesus-theistic standpoint, to work at a task God calls me to brings great emotional and spiritual fulfillment.
For me this applies to even small, seemingly insignificant tasks. For example, whenever I arrive at a friend's home and see dishes that need to be done, or trash that needs to be taken out, I'm finding that I'm beginning to love doing the dishes or carrying a trash across a parking lot. The purpose for me is: this will bless my friends. It is one thing they will not have to do. It is a way to show them that I love them. To work with a purpose is to co-labor with God and His purposes. That is not only good, but therapy for the soul. I want to come to the end of my life knowing God has worked through me to accomplish His desires.
This doesn't have to apply only to "good deeds." Colossians 3 tell us, "And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him... Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving."
To labor with no sense of purpose is a kind of hell. It is boredom. "Boredom" is not having nothing to do; boredom is finding no meaning in what you are doing. Purposeless work produces inner agitation. It is "a useless and ill-directed action of the body." Yuck! I continue to meet many people who live purposeless lives and thus experience a constant back-and-forth movement in their disquieted spirit. What should one do?
What Thomas Merton writes is helpful here. Merton says:
“Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected, if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace.
Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. Agitation -- a condition of spirit that is quite normal in the world of business -- is the fruit of tension in a spirit that is turning dizzily from one stimulus to another and trying to react to fifteen different appeals at the same time. Under the surface of agitation, and furnishing it with its monstrous and inexhaustible drive, is the force of fear or elemental greed for money, or pleasure, or power. The more complex a man’s passion, the more complex his agitation.
All this is the death of the interior life. Occasional church-going and the recitation of hasty prayers have no power to cleanse this purulent wound.” (No Man Is an Island, 114-115)
Merton says that to work for the goals of money, pleasure, or power is to cultivate the agitated heart. It brings "the death of the interior life." The antidote to this is: dwell, now, in Christ. (See John 14-16) Abide in Jesus. Let Him shepherd your soul. A little bit of churchgoing won't help. Constant abiding will. Out of this Christ-dwelling comes not only His peace and joy but our life purpose.
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