In the 5th grade, two things were certain. Hannah Montana was the best show ever created, and I would never have to get a real job because the world was ending in 2012.
I guess somewhere between my Disney Channel binges and listening to popular playground theology a’la Left Behind (and some conversations about the rapture with my dad), I had come to the conclusion that the end of the world was better than growing up choosing a career path I wasn’t sure I’d like. My mom and dad were both very fulfilled in their jobs as a teacher and millwright, so I’m not sure where I formulated this idea that the moment I started working, my life would be reduced to monotony. Perhaps it was from watching the adults who hated their jobs on TV? Maybe I can blame the Disney Channel binges after all.
I write this from a moment in history which, for many, feels like the end of the world. The impact of Covid19 has been felt all around the globe, and if it has not affected your life via infection, it has at least impacted your work.
In the first couple weeks of quarantine yeast was scarce, which TBH made me feel like I was in the world of the Hunger Games. Side note: I bought my sister a bow for Christmas but forgot a set of arrows. Weeks ago when reports went out that meat was becoming scarce in the stores, I seriously considered ordering arrows—but then again, what could I shoot? Squirrels? Proof that Covid makes us crazy.
Anyway, it turns out that yeast wasn’t scarce because people were starving and truly needed to bake bread.
After being cooped up in their homes, they were bored. They wanted something to do!
The serial bakers weren’t the only ones. One family I know photographed themselves in monochrome each day, cycling through the colors of the rainbow in impressively coordinated outfits.
My sister has successfully started three quarantine projects, including painting a pair roller skates (each side with a different, famous Van Gogh work), decorating the covers of several hardback Bibles, and teaching herself ukulele.
In my own restlessness, and between teaching online and taking my own classes I put together a planter box, restarted my garden, and built the Taj Mahal chicken coop of my dreams (still to be finished).
Despite the economic impact, the devastation of the lives lost, not to mention the inevitable changes we will all adapt to once we’re finally allowed to reenter society, I can’t help but wonder if this is all making us more…human.
Allow me to take you back to the beginning. Not the beginning of quarantine, or even the start of this tumultuous year, but to our beginning. Back to Eden.
In the beginning God makes the Earth and creates a Garden and places the man in it, “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15).
Before sin even enters the world the man is given the Garden to tend and the animals to name. Many of us associate work with the curse and yet, Adam was called to work before the curse had taken hold. To many, the idea of work is Hell, and understandably so. In Genesis 3, after sin enters the world, God casts the man and woman from the Garden, relaying the resulting curse. Adam’s curse specifically has to do with his work (Gen. 3:17-19). No longer will the plants grow without effort. From then on, life would be hard, and work would be work.
Yet, going back to the time before the curse, it seems that work was part of God’s good plan for us. Right after Adam’s creation, his first task is to work:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
Gen. 2:15
Could it be, then, that we were actually made to work? To create with our hands, to add value, and to make things lovely, because we were made in the image of the Father who does exactly that?
We learn of God’s desire for His creation to create when He says, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it” (Genesis 1:28). This is not merely a request that his children simply have more children, but a command to multiply all that is given in His grace. The command to work and to be fruitful is not a result of sin because it preceded the Fall. It means that as Christians, we are called to work. We are invited to create as our Father created, using our gifts, our resources, and our time to be fruitful and multiply, making God’s beauty and glory known to the world.
Going back to baking and gardening and, in my case, building a chicken coop, perhaps quarantine has been the reset some of us needed to begin working again–and I don’t just mean showing up to a job each day. There is a difference between dispassionate work as unto man and passionate work as unto the Lord (Colossians 3:23). I was somewhat lucky that my job as a teacher was only slightly changed. In-person learning became distance learning, and my resilient and computer-savvy band of 7th graders were champs and learned how to navigate Google classroom in a matter of days. And while some friends of mine who were not so lucky settled into quarantine with nothing to pass the time but whatever they hadn’t already watched from their Netflix queue, I have been encouraged by the ones who answered that Edenic call to create.
As God’s creatures who are wholly dependent on Him to sustain us, we were made to rest, as demonstrated by the Lord on the 7th day of Creation. However, we were also made to work. It’s a desire that is simply built into us. And so, when we are displaced and told specifically not to go to work, we begin crocheting and baking until the world smells of crusty, yeasty bread and breathes a little deeper than it did before. I pray that this time brings about an awareness of the beauty and creativity of God, both for those who know Him and for those who don’t yet.
While an invisible virus sweeps the planet and unmakes our long held plans, may we be fruitful and multiply and make.
May we collapse from our crude scaffolds and fall backwards toward childlike dependance, building glistening, intricate structures from His abundance.
And may we reflect our Creator, using our newfound time to work and to create beautiful things.
Kayley Chartier 