“Finding Balance in a World that Demands Action” December 17, 2023
Dr. Roger Ray click here to see the video
As the holiday season arrived again this year, the airways began to shift to the classical holiday songs, one of which we will inevitably hear daily for a couple more weeks is Brenda Lee’s 1958 classic, “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.” An NPR reporter interviewed the now 78 year old artist recently and in that interview I learned that Brenda Lee was just 13 years old when she recorded that song. 13 . . . and they have been playing that song to death for 65 years. I don’t know what first comes to mind for you when you learned that but what immediately struck me is that this young woman was set for life at the age of 13 on the strength of one song. Now, she went on to have a singing career but, honestly, she didn’t have to.
She is not Elon Musk or Bill Gates rich, but her net worth is over $20 million and I doubt that much of that came from her recording of “Toot, toot, tootsie.” I had a similar reaction when I learned that the beautiful actress who first played Queen Amidala, Natalie Portman, in the 1999 Star Wars movie, the Phantom Menace, was only 16 years old when filming began. I loved the movie but I was immediately envious of the fact that at the age of 16, she was financially set for life.
Of course, there are people who are trust fund babies, born into the security of family wealth, but it seems somehow different when you can see someone move from obscurity into life long security in a single gesture in their teenaged years.
Our American economy is structured to literally fill us with anxiety from our birth. How are we going to survive? We turn education into nothing more than a means of sharpening our employment prospects, we avoid universal healthcare and tie any affordable healthcare option directly to employment, compounding our fear of the future with uncertainty about where we will live, will we be able to eat, get healthcare, and, “Oh my God,” what if we become disabled, or pregnant, or what if there is another recession, or, “God forbid,” another great depression?
The American economy is built on fear and dread, even though we are the richest country, not just the richest country in the world, but the richest country in all of human history. Maybe that anxiety has helped to turn our Protestant work ethic into national wealth; but it sure hasn’t done much to make us a happier or more mentally healthy society. We didn’t hear much about the hard fought battles to establish a 40 hour work week or to safeguard a two day weekend for most workers, but, I can tell you, whatever semblance of employment security, safety, and fair compensation that we now enjoy, it came with a bloody price tag.
Still, in the USA, if you are lucky enough to have paid vacation at all, it is almost never more than two weeks…. 10 paid days off. And many employers offer exactly none. For most of my adult life, as a pastor, I officially had 4 weeks of vacation but my work load was such that I never got to take it. At times, I went years without a vacation, obviously working weekends and holidays, and rarely getting 24 hours off in any week and there was always some board member who thought I was lazy.
But let me just clue you in about paid vacations around the world.
Only Micronesia gets fewer vacation days than Americans and they get 9. Mexico gets 14, Canadians enjoy 19 days off, and most of Central and South America gets about a month off every year. Our allies in western Europe are all way ahead of us, Great Britain gets 28 days, except for Scotland which gets 38 days. Most of Europe and Africa get about a month of vacation every year.
What’s more, think about countries that Americans tend to think of as being heartless nations with bad human rights, China gives their people 16 days of vacation every year, Russians get 42, and the nation with the most generous paid vacation in the world is Iran with 52. Because, people, as much as this may come as a surprise to many of you, there is more to life than going to work!
When I turned 65, rather than just retiring, I split my job with our friend, David Ketchum. The idea was that we could both work half-time and so we began to figure out different ways of dividing our church duties so that I could travel more. My first 2 week vacation came right after my 65th birthday. I took my scuba gear to Cozumel where I rented a one room apartment a few miles from the beach where I was surrounded by other international vacationers.
I met a delightful 30-something couple at the pool who were living very frugal lives in a tiny apartment there. He was from Argentina, she was from Kansas, they had met working in a hotel in Australia, and they had decided that they would work for a few months, save everything they could, and then not work until they had to try to go make money again. They were managing to work less than half of the year every year. I have to tell you, I have never experienced so much self doubt about the choices that I have made in my life and career.
I had always taken vacations when I was at the point of exhaustion. I would lay down my axe and take a few days off when I felt drained, burned out, sometimes at the breaking point. They were working only when they needed to pay the rent and buy groceries. I’m sure that their parents thought that they were horribly irresponsible. I would die if my daughter decided to do something like this, and yet, even though they were not saving for retirement and they certainly didn’t own a house or a car, but, guys, they had broken through the myth that we exist only to work. They had conquered the fear of poverty and hunger.
Let me say it again, you were born for more than to go to work every day. I have realized that as I have pulled my work schedule back from constantly leaning forward in the saddle that not taking enough time off is the largest reason why I was not more successful. I was so ambitious, so afraid of failure, that my life was entirely out of balance. I really wanted to be the best pastor, the best counselor, I wanted to be the best preacher, the best at presiding over weddings, baptisms, and funerals. I even took singing and guitar lessons because I wanted to be able to make a positive contribution to the church’s music program . . . which was a colossal waste of money and time.
I don’t wish that I could have lived my adult life as my friends in Mexico were doing it. I didn’t need to be liberated from work for several months out of the year, but I did need to step back enough to find balance, to gain perspective, to understand why working harder and more hours wasn’t making me more popular and more successful.
And what I am going to say now may be more specific to life as a Protestant pastor than to anything else, but when I entered the ministry in the late 70’s, churches had come through a boom time that was all a part of the Baby Boom in post-World War America. WW II created the technological and economic innovations that created the middle class and with it came the suburbs and suburban churches with their huge edifices that later generations struggled to fill.
In 1991 I became the Senior Pastor of this sprawling Georgian Colonial church whose sanctuary seated 250 but the two education wings provided classroom space for 500. In the 1960’s, it had seemed reasonable to this church that they could fill the sanctuary twice every Sunday and fill their Sunday School classes with 500 people every week. But in the 1970’s, as families became smaller and divorce became more common, Sunday School attendance fell off a cliff. In the 1980’s, mainstream church attendance began to fall off precipitously.
But the church of that era still had an active memory of when, in the 50’s and 60’s, they had been full and they were desperate to return to those days without any accounting for how the world had changed. I worked myself to death trying to have a successful 1960’s church in the 1990’s. We tried to rebuild youth groups, children’s choirs, Sunday School classes, church camp, Vacation Bible School . . . all things that belonged to another era.
By the early part of this century, I realized that we were spending so much money on staff and attractive technology and entertainment, trying to attract the children of that generation, that we could have been more successful if we had just paid them $15 an hour to attend. I was desperate, to the point of panic, wanting to be successful but I never stepped back far enough to realize that a successful church in the 21st century would not look at all like a successful church of the mid 20th century.
When I left that church in 2007, the denomination still had ministers filling out annual reports to tell them how successful we were being by telling them the numbers…. What was our average attendance, how many new members were brought in that year, how many new baptisms, how much capital money was raised, what was the weekly offering? They wanted us to count what could be counted without ever asking ourselves what really counted, the things that cannot be counted in any objective way. . . marriages saved, suicides prevented, moral encouragement given, direction, meaning, training in compassion, and real service to those in need.
No one ever asked about those things which, necessarily means that those things didn’t matter as much as donations, attendance, and numerical growth. I wish that I could go back in time and explain all of this to my 35 year old self but I am not sure that I could have believed it back then.
Still, even when I moved pass formal Christianity and the prison of institutional church life, I poured my energy into being a social activist. I fought against injustice with the same passion I had expended trying to fill up a huge church.
We are living in a dynamic time. Somehow, at least half of our country seems to be determined to destroy our constitutional democracy and replace it with a fascist dictatorship that will take away civil rights, oppress minorities, and inflict unspeakable cruelties on people that will make only getting 10 days of paid vacation each year seem unimportant… the worst possible things are increasingly probable for the future of our country and somehow these horrible things seem likely to be voted in by popular vote. It feels like America is living out a constant “opposite day” that makes no sense at all.
I am advocating for intentional balancing in a world that is desperately in need of action, of leadership, of greater personal investment and greater involvement but because the need is so great, leading a balanced life is just that much more important.
Because the world seems almost to be teetering on the edge of self-destruction, you should take time to go to the beach, take a walk in the woods, spend an evening with friends, go out and hear live music, attend a live theater production. How long has it been since you had a meal with your family without cell phones or a TV on in the background. Do you know what exhibits are currently at your local art museum? Are you living or just going to work?
Spend time with your family. Let your inner child come out to play a bit at Christmas. Wear the ugly sweater, drink the punch, spend too much on gifts, eat too much and regain some sense of yourself and what you are doing with your life. I’ll see you on New Year’s Eve.
