The Fall’s Thorns and Thistles

How “Edenic” do these conditions sound?

• Planting under the threat of mass starvation due to drought in the ancient world
• Laboring without breaks in a twentieth-century industrial factory
• Being buried in hundreds of pointless emails in a suffocating office

Work can be soul-crushing, flat, and empty, if not downright dangerous.

So what went wrong?

First, take a moment to honestly consider: How much does your work affect your peace? Does it feel like a constant grind or boring? Somewhere in between?

God cursed work with “thorns and thistles” after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, disobeying God and choosing to take wisdom into their own hands and disobeying their Lord.

Thorns and thistles were vivid images to nomadic herding, and later agrarian, people. And what better way to portray “stress and overtime and belligerent bosses and mundane meetings,” as pastor Bob Thune put it?

Tim Keller in Every Good Endeavor points out that sin seeps into public and private life. In fact, we become thorns in workplaces ourselves if we’re not careful. So it’s not merely some impersonal curse on work, although that is surely a part of it. At the end of the day, humans are imperfect and sinful, making things harder and more toilsome than needed.

If your regular work involves stress, frustrated fruitlessness, pointlessness, self-centeredness, or intense weariness, remember that these are outplayings of the curse brought about by broken people, systems, and the fallen nature of life.

Consider your job.

Do anger, impatience, negligence, or other sins exist in your work?

Pray for conviction on how you might be a thorn to others.

Identify thistles in the workplace and bring them to Lord, asking for contentedness despite them. Pray for healing over those pains, whether it stems from coworkers, systemic problems, or seem inherent to the tasks.