Last week, since we have finished the Book of Acts, Pastor took a break and preached from one of the Psalms. Psalm 127 which is about work and family. Now I don't know if it was just coincidence (it was Children's Dedication Sunday) or whether the recent Rush Limbaugh controversy had anything to do with his subject, but I think he ruffled a few of the women's feathers. I know he ruffled mine. We are starting the Book of Esther next, and I am very interested in what he has to say about that.
Psalm 127 is the one that starts out "Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain." It is primarily addressed (like most of the Bible) to men. So Pastor dwelt at length on the man's "role". He talked about the way our culture demands that work take precedence over the family. Well, I have news for him. It is not only MEN who are affected by this. I work in a company that up until the crash of 2008 was a prime example of what he was talking about It was no secret in the greater community that this company demanded a lot of its employees as far as overtime, taking work home, and so forth. If you did not draw boundaries (and you had to be very careful how you did so), they would work you as much as humanly possible and then some. It was not uncommon to hear of people having to work until 2 or 3 in the morning and that was on top of the 8 hours they had already put in.
So what Pastor was saying on that subject was nothing new. We hear a lot about how much stress "costs" the economy, but the fact is, as I pointed out in one of my business classes, stress is actually big business. I make a living in part because of stress. Where do you think all these drugs like Xanax come from? Recently at my professional organization we had a speaker come in and talk about meditation and stress. And of course she had lots and lots of materials to sell at a real nice price. So don't tell me how much stress costs. If stress were not profitable there would be more energy put into ways of preventing stress buildup in the first place and companies would not insist that their employees put in long hours away from home.
What I want to know, and I asked him this afterwards, is what do you do when you are caught up in a situation where the job comes first, where you are told you will work these hours, and your family has to shift the best they can? He said talk to your boss. Then he said, look for another job. Well, I've heard these answers before, too, and it's obvious that the people who so glibly come up with them have never been in a situation where a) talking to the boss brands you as someone who is not a team player and b) if you haven't noticed, jobs are not all that easy to come by these days. He can say that because he hasn't been there. But he ought to be careful, because his job as full-time pastor depends on enough of his congregation keeping their jobs so they can support him and his family.
But that was not the part that ruffled people's feathers. He then went to preach on the verse that children are like arrows and blessed be the man (man!) who has a quiver full of them. Now I agree that much of our culture is very much anti-child, but what he said next came awfully close to the Catholic viewpoint that "each and every sexual act must be open to the transmission of life." He did not come right out and say contraception was wrong, but it was implied. And if you are going strictly by the Bible, the Bible is very much pro-big-families. In fact, up until the 1930's most major Christian denominations taught that birth control was wrong. There are still some holdouts, the Catholic church being the most well-known.
Children are a blessing from God, he said, and so we should welcome them. We should be open to them. We should make room for more of them in our lives.
All well and good, but now I have another question (which I did not ask him). When all these children grow up, what kind of jobs will they have? Where are they going to work? Increasingly the trend is to have less and less employees do more and more work and I don't see that reversing. And to get a decent paying job to support all these children he is encouraging people to have, requires a college education. When parents are advised to start saving for their children's college education as soon as the child is born if not before, that's a pretty revealing statement of where college costs are headed. It may be, as I've heard proposed, that we are in an education bubble just like the housing market was in a bubble, but I am not holding my breath for tuition to go down. (And housing prices haven't fallen all that much either--there are still a lot of people like myself who can't afford a house. Housing prices have a LONG way to go before that happens.)
Thirty years ago when I started working where I work now, we had 20 typists doing a job that nowadays takes only a handful to do. I can do more in one day using a computer than I did in one week back then. And this trend is not reversing either. That means 15 people have to find new jobs or go unemployed. Many assembly lines are fully automated. Yesterday I was at a talk on the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking and the speaker said that one of the reasons there hasn't been a sinking like that on the Great Lakes since then is due to technology. He then predicted that in a few years sailors will not be needed as the ships will be able to be controlled by computer at the home offices in Cleveland or Chicago. The public is not ready to accept pilotless commercial aircraft but the technology is there or about to be there. And it is not just "blue-collar" jobs that are being affected. A while back I ran into a friend who said he'd been in the hospital for surgery. "Do you know who my doctor was?" he said. "Dr. Robot!" He'd been operated on by a robot!
Now I am no Luddite, but the Luddites were right in a way, because each new advance in labor-saving technology eliminates jobs. Look at all the cashiers' jobs that have been eliminated because of self-serve checkouts (I refuse to use them). So when Pastor says we should bring more children into the world, I want to know, what kind of jobs will await them? What will they do for a living?
This is something I think we should think long and hard about.
Psalm 127 is the one that starts out "Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain." It is primarily addressed (like most of the Bible) to men. So Pastor dwelt at length on the man's "role". He talked about the way our culture demands that work take precedence over the family. Well, I have news for him. It is not only MEN who are affected by this. I work in a company that up until the crash of 2008 was a prime example of what he was talking about It was no secret in the greater community that this company demanded a lot of its employees as far as overtime, taking work home, and so forth. If you did not draw boundaries (and you had to be very careful how you did so), they would work you as much as humanly possible and then some. It was not uncommon to hear of people having to work until 2 or 3 in the morning and that was on top of the 8 hours they had already put in.
So what Pastor was saying on that subject was nothing new. We hear a lot about how much stress "costs" the economy, but the fact is, as I pointed out in one of my business classes, stress is actually big business. I make a living in part because of stress. Where do you think all these drugs like Xanax come from? Recently at my professional organization we had a speaker come in and talk about meditation and stress. And of course she had lots and lots of materials to sell at a real nice price. So don't tell me how much stress costs. If stress were not profitable there would be more energy put into ways of preventing stress buildup in the first place and companies would not insist that their employees put in long hours away from home.
What I want to know, and I asked him this afterwards, is what do you do when you are caught up in a situation where the job comes first, where you are told you will work these hours, and your family has to shift the best they can? He said talk to your boss. Then he said, look for another job. Well, I've heard these answers before, too, and it's obvious that the people who so glibly come up with them have never been in a situation where a) talking to the boss brands you as someone who is not a team player and b) if you haven't noticed, jobs are not all that easy to come by these days. He can say that because he hasn't been there. But he ought to be careful, because his job as full-time pastor depends on enough of his congregation keeping their jobs so they can support him and his family.
But that was not the part that ruffled people's feathers. He then went to preach on the verse that children are like arrows and blessed be the man (man!) who has a quiver full of them. Now I agree that much of our culture is very much anti-child, but what he said next came awfully close to the Catholic viewpoint that "each and every sexual act must be open to the transmission of life." He did not come right out and say contraception was wrong, but it was implied. And if you are going strictly by the Bible, the Bible is very much pro-big-families. In fact, up until the 1930's most major Christian denominations taught that birth control was wrong. There are still some holdouts, the Catholic church being the most well-known.
Children are a blessing from God, he said, and so we should welcome them. We should be open to them. We should make room for more of them in our lives.
All well and good, but now I have another question (which I did not ask him). When all these children grow up, what kind of jobs will they have? Where are they going to work? Increasingly the trend is to have less and less employees do more and more work and I don't see that reversing. And to get a decent paying job to support all these children he is encouraging people to have, requires a college education. When parents are advised to start saving for their children's college education as soon as the child is born if not before, that's a pretty revealing statement of where college costs are headed. It may be, as I've heard proposed, that we are in an education bubble just like the housing market was in a bubble, but I am not holding my breath for tuition to go down. (And housing prices haven't fallen all that much either--there are still a lot of people like myself who can't afford a house. Housing prices have a LONG way to go before that happens.)
Thirty years ago when I started working where I work now, we had 20 typists doing a job that nowadays takes only a handful to do. I can do more in one day using a computer than I did in one week back then. And this trend is not reversing either. That means 15 people have to find new jobs or go unemployed. Many assembly lines are fully automated. Yesterday I was at a talk on the Edmund Fitzgerald sinking and the speaker said that one of the reasons there hasn't been a sinking like that on the Great Lakes since then is due to technology. He then predicted that in a few years sailors will not be needed as the ships will be able to be controlled by computer at the home offices in Cleveland or Chicago. The public is not ready to accept pilotless commercial aircraft but the technology is there or about to be there. And it is not just "blue-collar" jobs that are being affected. A while back I ran into a friend who said he'd been in the hospital for surgery. "Do you know who my doctor was?" he said. "Dr. Robot!" He'd been operated on by a robot!
Now I am no Luddite, but the Luddites were right in a way, because each new advance in labor-saving technology eliminates jobs. Look at all the cashiers' jobs that have been eliminated because of self-serve checkouts (I refuse to use them). So when Pastor says we should bring more children into the world, I want to know, what kind of jobs will await them? What will they do for a living?
This is something I think we should think long and hard about.
