Maybe it's 'cause I Grew up on a Farm

Statistics will tell you the average American spends roughly a third of their lives working, but I don’t think statistics have ever considered the farmer. A farmer works when the weather is good, with no regard for the clock. During the planting and harvesting seasons, work continues until it cannot.?

I grew up on a farm; we didn’t have time to consider work and life balance. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat…and neither did other people. Work has always been a matter of sustaining life - but I suppose raising corn, soybeans, and wheat made that connection easy for me.

To me, there’s no separation between work, life, and worship; we moved almost in a rhythm on our farm. We would toil away planting, weeding, and harvesting, and then we would relax. It was extremely rare to see a tractor in the field on a Sunday in the farming community where I grew up. You could feel the rhythm that flowed through farm life: Rest on the Lord’s day.??

Sunday was a day for family. We shared a meal together and it was understood that no heavy work needed to be done that day. We appreciated resting our bodies and restoring our minds.? The impact of this rhythm overflowed into other aspects of my life and since then, I have religiously taken a day off - and that day has almost exclusively been Sunday.?

Whether I was taking classes in college or running my business, there was no work done on Sunday. No homework, no customer quotes, no going into the shop. While I can’t always turn off my mind or shut my mouth, the rhythm of Work and Rest has turned out well for me. I never turned in a late assignment in college - and business seems to be going well for me.?

I don’t understand the idea of work/life balance. As a child I remember walking rows of soybeans with a hoe looking for milkweeds to chop down. My mother was beside me, with my baby sister strapped into a carrier on her back. We talked while we worked, shared so much of our lives together. Along came Round-Up Ready soybeans and the work was over faster, but so was the conversation.

Today I work with several of my family members. We talk about our problems, and blessed with the context and rhythm of a shared workspace, there is better understanding. At work we talk about our children, and at home we talk about our work. I wouldn’t call this balance - I call it integration. Deep in our minds we understand that if we don’t work, we aren’t going to eat. If we don’t love, then we won’t have joy.?

I love and care about the people I work with. It’s great fun when our team members have someone in their family stop by with a cup of coffee, or tag along on a business trip. We do meaningful work that provides value and safety for people’s homes. This is rewarding work that deserves to be enjoyed - not balanced out or segmented.?

I take the moniker “old-fashioned” as a compliment. My own life is proof to me that an integrated life is far better than a segmented one based on the notion of work-life balance. So go ahead and check your email when you’re home tonight, and take a moment to talk to Jody about how her mom is doing. Take a few moments to send a text to your child. Enjoy your work - enjoy your life.