Session 1: Work and You

Working in God’s worldSession 3

Keeping your balance

1. God’s work

Gruelling Work: (or why work is so hard!)

In order to review the “Gruelling Work” paper – What would you say to Pilgrim and Christina?

Christina is now 6 months into her work as an economist with a big firm in the city. She gets on pretty well with her colleagues who are all fairly new graduates. Her boss can sometimes be a bit bossy but he is generally pretty nice to her. She has found working 9-5 a bit of a step up compared to uni life and there is a fairly big expectation that she will do a lot of overtime. She doesn’t get to see her boyfriend Pilgrim as much as she used to but generally work is great and she loves it. However Christina is a bit concerned she has just read Genesis 3 again and feels that work shouldn’t really be good. Work should be hard and difficult. What’s wrong with her? Is she doing something wrong?

Pilgrim is now 6 months into his work as a physiotherapist at St Eutychus Children’s Hospital. He has found the adjustment to work really hard. There are lots of long hours, which are physically demanding. He finds rehabilitating kids after serious accidents really confronting and his job places him in contact with people in very difficult situations. And it is hard to make a real difference Pilgrim feels like he is just putting on band aids their real needs are spiritual. His colleague Cyrus is great fun to work with but he is an atheist and says pretty confronting things to Pilgrim about Christians. The amazing thing about Cyrus is that he is so great with the kids, he is always really patient with them and is always going out of his way to care for them. Pilgrim had hoped to be able to really care for people in his job but he is flat out just getting through the day. Pilgrim knew that God said work would be hard but he didn’t know it would be this hard. And what about Cyrus how come the non- Christian is doing all the good stuff and he’s just keeping his head above water? Was he just naïve to think that he could make any real contribution through his work?

2.God’s workers

Pleasing God with Ordered Lives (or ‘how can I stay sane in the ‘real world’’?)

1. Think Relationally

We need to view reality through these relational glasses – that relationships and community are at the heart of reality, since they are at the heart of God See it in the quote from DB Knox:

“The most ultimate thing that can be said of God is that He is Trinity. He always has been, always will be. Three persons in one God, one God in personal relationship within Himself. He has created man in His own image and likeness. This means that man is fundamentally a being in personal relationship, in relationship with God and with his fellows. Therefore, humanity’s nature is created to facilitate personal relationship to God and to one another. The establishment, maintenance and deepening of personal relationship is the true object for human activity, relationship with God and with fellow men.”

D.B. Knox in The Everlasting God, p133.

2. God has placed each of us in multiple communities

In a previous session, we saw how each of us has a unique contribution to make to the communities in which God has placed us. The focus of this session is on the importance of wisely balancing your contributions to these various communities.

God has placed us in 3 general spheres of relationships: family and friends, church and society (which could be further divided into many different areas including workplace, government, neighbourhood, national and international contributions)

Our responsibilities to these spheres of relationships are diverse, but are summarised by our responsibility to LOVE: to do good as we have opportunity.

3. Tips

• It’s not un-Christian to say ‘no’ to people – the principle is not acquiescence the principle is love.

• Loving is demanding and involves sharing in the sufferings of Christ. From time to time painful crises will arise, this should not deter us.

• However if the answer to ‘how are you?’ is always negative – eg. ‘tired’ ‘stressed’ ‘busy’ ‘struggling’ – this should set off warning bells. A never-ending state of crisis is not a good position from which to love people.

• Remember week 1: the contribution we will make is real but limited. Our job is to be faithful, trusting in God to bless our efforts.

4. A Tool: the 4 Quadrants

Important

I

• Crises
• Pressing Problems
• Deadline-driven projects, meetings, preparations

II

• Preparation
• Prevention
• Values clarification
• Planning
• Relationship building
• True re-creation
• Empowerment

III

• Interruptions, some phone calls
• Some mail, some reports
• Some meetings
• Many proximate, pressing matters
• Many popular activities

IV

• Trivia, busywork
• Junk mail
• Some phone calls
• Time wasters
• “Escape” activities

For more on the 4 quadrants see First Things First by Stephen Covey.

1. Homework

1. head work

Read the paper ‘Redeemed Work’, which continues constructing our theological framework.

Create a draft budget in preparation for the next session.

2. hearing stories

Read “An Evangelical Commitment to Simple Lifestyle” – Hear what The World Evangelical Fellowship Theological Commission’s Unit on Ethics and Society and the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelisation has to say about a simple lifestyle.

3. fyi

Emilie Schindler, Unsung saviour of Polish Jews, 1907-2001

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Working in God’s worldSession 2

The life of Emilie Schindler, who died on October 5 at the age of 93, was overshadowed by that of her industrialist husband, Oskar, who was hailed for having saved more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. Although her significant role in that campaign was acknowledged in Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book, Schindler’s Ark, she was sidelined in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List (1993).

In 1993, however, Emilie was awarded Israel’s Righteous Among The Nations Award for her virtually single-handed success in stopping the Nazis from sending a trainload of 120 Jewish men, women and children to Auschwitz.

After the film came out, Emilie published a memoir, Where Light and Shadow Meet, and gave interviews in which she complained that neither Keneally’s book nor Spielberg’s film had made much of her part in saving the Schindlerjuden. She drew attention to the complexity of her husband’s motives, claiming that he had been acting at least partly out of self-interest. Against that, she testified that he had no trace of anti-Semitism, counting his workers among his friends and, indeed, his mistresses.

Born to Catholic farmers in the village of Alt Moletein, Sudetenland, in what is now the Czech Republic, Emilie Pelzl studied at agricultural college and seemed prepared to spend her life farming. But when she was 20, the swarthy, charming Oskar Schindler drove up to the farm on his motorbike and whisked her off her feet. They married on March 6, 1928, in the Czech town of Zwittau and spent their first years together living with Oskar’s parents.

In 1935, Oskar had begun working with German military counterintelligence, the Abwehrdienst, which nearly got him executed by the Czechoslovaks in 1939. But after Hitler invaded Poland, he accepted a Nazi offer to run a Jewish-owned enamelware factory in Krakow, employing cheap labour from the local ghetto.

Emilie joined him in 1941, the year before he bought the factory partly with funds raised in the ghetto. In return, Schindler employed Jewish workers from the nearby Plaschow concentration camp.

Sometimes opportunist, he joined the Nazi party, courted the SS with bribes and used his influential friends to save his workers from the cattle trucks. Emilie played the role of obedient and pretty wife, cutting between entertaining the local SS commandant, Amoth Goeth, to dinner and feeding starving Jews. She became adept at buying fruit and vegetables on the black market.

After the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and the transportation of its inmates, Schindler composed his famous list, promising Nazi commanders money for each of the 1,300 men, women and children whom he said he would employ in his munitions factory in Brunnlitz, in Czechoslovakia.

Emilie always insisted that it was she - and not her husband - who signed the documents that saved the workers. She went to the mayor of Brunnlitz, her former swimming teacher, and obtained the permit that was to save their lives. The workers at Brunnlitz never worked and the Schindlers spent much of their time trying to feed them.

Towards the end of the war, Emilie helped save about 120 near-starving and frozen Jews from an Auschwitz-bound train. “The people were far too weak to work,” she later recalled. “But I told the guards: ‘Yes, we’ll take them’.”

At the end of the war, the penniless Schindlers moved to Munich and, in 1949, to Buenos Aires, where they attempted to make a living mink-farming. He left her in 1957 with a huge pile of debts and returned to Germany. She never answered his letters and did not attend his funeral in 1974. In the 1950s, the Jewish organisation B’nai B’rith secured her a pension, which was later supplemented by Germany.

In 1993, Emilie became the centre of attention: Spielberg invited her to the premiere of Schindler's List in Washington, and gave her $US50,000. She was repeatedly invited back to Germany.

Last July, she fulfilled her wish to return to Germany to die, settling into a retirement home in Bavaria. After a stroke, she spent her final two months in a clinic outside Berlin. To the end, she swayed between admiration and contempt for her husband, whom she had refused to divorce. She said recently: “If I could choose again, I would pick Oskar.”

The Schindlers had no children and Emilie is survived by a niece.

Kate Connolly, The Guardian

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