“Work-life balance” is a useful phrase—up to a point. It pushes back against exploitation, overwork, and the idolatrous pursuit of identity through achievement. But it also carries a hidden assumption that many younger people absorb without noticing: that work is not part of life, that life begins only when work ends. For Christians, that picture is too small for human beings made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–28).
A biblical worldview would suggest that while work is not everything, neither is it something outside the real business of being human. Before work became painful by the sweat of the brow, human beings were already given creaturely tasks: to tend, name, cultivate, keep, and serve within God’s good creation (Gen. 2:15). To be human is to do creation affirming and extending work: to make, repair, teach, build, serve, imagine, innovate and improve some portion of the resources of the earth. That is why vocation is a better ideal than work-life balance.
Frederick Buechner defines vocation in Wishful Thinking (HarperOne, 1993) as the place where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” (119). God has given you something that this world desperately needs. You have a part to play in the creative and redeeming work of God. Finding that part and living that part will make you feel deeply alive and truly human.
The concept of vocation is built upon the assumption that human beings do not define themselves, rather they discover their God-given place in the world. Vocation lives where grace-given joy and neighbour-love meet. It is neither private fulfilment alone nor grim self-erasure, but a form of faithful response to the God who calls each of us into lives of love.
Avoiding the Ditches
As is often the case, there is a ditch on either side of this narrow road.
Older people were often taught to ignore their passions and personal interests in order to make “responsible choices” and to “do what needed to be done”. A sense of obligation and a fear of poverty drove many Baby Boomers and their older brothers and sisters in the Silent Generation to become workaholics.
The cultural memory of the Great Depression and the ongoing Cold War fostered a sense that everyone had to do their part in the battle for survival and supremacy. Many people of that generation willingly became cogs in the machine and engaged in work that they didn’t fully understand and that served ends they didn’t personally identify with. This created a momentum towards the separation of work and life.
Work was what you did for money and for the benefit of society, and life was what you did with your friends and family on evenings and weekends. Many of today’s young people grew up watching their parents doing a great deal of work while enjoying very little of life, and they resolved to do things differently.
Younger people today tend to think of work mainly in instrumental terms: earn enough, protect your free time, avoid stress, and keep your “real self” elsewhere. In reaction to their parents, they are trying to have as much life as possible, for as little work as can be managed. Whereas their parents tried hard to make sure that personal time did not negatively influence work, they are trying hard to make sure that work does not negatively influence personal time.
But if you give in to this way of thinking, you may never ask what value your work has before the Lord. You may become efficient without becoming integrated. You may preserve yourself without ever offering yourself. And eventually you may discover that a life arranged only around escape produces not peace but thinness.
Human beings do not flourish by treating responsibility as an interruption of life. We flourish by receiving our gifts as stewardship and by discovering forms of responsibility worthy of love.
The “Work-Life” Balance Trap
So how can we break out of the “work-life balance” trap?
First, stop asking how to keep work from taking too much of your life. Instead, ask what kind of work is worthy of your life before God. Think about what you could do that would glorify God and be a blessing to other people. Think about what needs or deficiencies in the world could be addressed by your God-given abilities and resources.
Second, pay attention to the work that leaves you more honest, more alive, and more useful to others. What kind of work brings out the best in you? What kind of work draws upon your God-given talents and passions?
Third, distrust the fantasy that your truest self lives somewhere outside your commitment to God and others. In most cases, your truest self will be formed through those commitments, not outside or apart from them.
Fourth, learn to discern vocation prayerfully and communally, not just privately: through Scripture, worship, wise counsel, and attention to the needs near at hand. Start doing things that you think you could be good at and that would address a need in the world and let others give you honest and constructive feedback.
And finally, remember that vocation is usually discerned imperfectly and progressively. You do not need total certainty before you begin. You need attentiveness, courage, teachability, and a willingness to let both gladness and hunger instruct you. When you find work that connects your deep gladness to a hunger and need in the world, you will have found your vocation, and once you have found it and begun functioning within it, you won’t be watching the clock and worrying that your work is encroaching upon your life. Your work will be a part of your whole life offering to God.
Lest you end up back in the ditch on the other side of the road, it will bear remembering that vocation does not mean career obsession. It does not mean baptizing ambition or calling every hustle a holy calling. In Christian terms, vocation means receiving one’s life as a summons from God. It asks not only, “How do I protect myself from my job?” but also, “To whom am I responsible? What kind of work is mine to do? How may my labour become a form of love of God and neighbour?”
Vocation gives us a richer moral and theological imagination because it treats work not as a rival to life, but as one of the central places where discipleship, service, and obedience are actually lived. As Paul writes, “Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters” (Col. 3:23–24).
Vocation also assumes and is fueled by a commitment to the practice of Sabbath. God rested on the seventh day not because he was tired and not because he needed a break from his work. Rather he rested so as to enjoy what he had made. Sabbath for us is about enjoying our Creator and delighting in our place within creation. It is a time for acknowledging our limits and appreciating the contributions of others and for giving glory to the Author and Giver of all good things.
Wholeness Under God
In the end, the concept of “work-life balance” may still have its place as a practical warning against excess. Christians should resist exploitation, reject the idolatry of busyness, and honour the goodness of Sabbath. But “work-life balance” is too thin to serve as a vision of the good life.
What we need is not merely balance, but wholeness under God. We need an understanding of work that honours rest without idolizing escape, that honours ambition without worshipping success, and that honours service without discounting joy.
Vocation directs us toward that better way. It reminds us that work is not the opposite of life; rather it is one of the deepest ways we answer God’s call to become fully human and to participate in his care and renewal of the world.
Pastor Paul Carter
If you are interested in more Bible teaching from Pastor Paul you can access the entire library of Into The Word episodes through the Audio tab on the Into the Word website. You can also download the Into The Word app on iTunes or Google Play.
