( Proverbs 20:13; 6:6; Colossians 3:23). These admonitions hang over our head as we take a break with a good book on the couch or spend an evening under the stars.
Imagine a golden retriever sprawled out on the living room floor. When a ball goes flying past, he slowly lifts his head only to place it back down. We’ d call this dog lazy not because he sleeps but because he refuses to fetch. His sleep has prohibited him from enacting the very purposes for which he was born and bred. In short, he’ s refusing to act like a dog. Likewise, laziness for you and me means a refusal to walk in line with our created purpose.
We’ ll find the purpose of our being within the pages of the Scriptures. In them we discover we were made to image God, worship him, reflect his character, proclaim his glory, create beauty, cultivate his land, and multiply in the earth. God fashioned us to receive his gifts, acknowledge our dependence, and accomplish the good works he prepared for us. These are only a few of the ways we fulfill our role as God’ s children. With Pieper’ s definition, any activity that fulfills our created purpose can’ t be written off as idleness, even if it might be something as enjoyable as your favorite hobby.
This frees us from the guilt that looms over us as we partake in our hobbies. Of course, we can still fall prey to leaning heavily on one purpose over another. Just as we can overemphasize our vocational role by never putting down our work phone, we can likewise overcommit within our avocation by never putting down a novel. Opportunity for neglect always abounds, yet this doesn’ t mean we need to brandish every activity that results in joy as the seed of laziness. The question we must ask instead is whether our hobbies enable us to fulfill the purposes for which we were made.
But I Don’ t Want to Be Unproductive
Close by our fear of laziness within hobbies lies our fear of their inefficiency. Goals and to-do lists
15