Leisure and the Gospel: A Day in the Life of Zadok pt. II

So, we’ve already established that Zadok has about 291 days a year committed to fulfilling his commitments as an intercessory missionary. This alone, however, doesn’t really establish for us just how much he is actually working – since every hour of those days could be spent in a multitude of ways.

Let’s do the numbers on those 291 days.

Of course, Zadok has to sleep and gets an average 8 hours a night. We’ll factor this into the number for rest at the end.

That leaves us with 4656 potential waking hours for working. Zadok has been given grace by God to do the night watch – a lifestyle that suits his character as a contemplative and his predilections as a night owl – and he goes whole hog jumping into it for 6 hours each working day.

That brings him down to 2910 hours for the rest of his IHOP responsibilities and the mundane activities that make up the rest of life. A man of habit, he decides to clean IHOP four hours a day 6 days a week.

That brings him down to 1746 hours for personal household responsibilities. He’s a family man – and he’s consistent in helping his wife with the kids and the household chores for a solid 4 hours each day.

That leaves Zadok with 582 potential leisure hours a year – or about two hours every day. (And that’s for a workhorse who does a fourteen hour day six days a week.)

I’m not going to ask for a show of hands of people who regularly do a fourteen hour day.

If we add up those 582 hours with the hours spent sleeping – and factor them into our percentages – we get…

53% of hour time each year is spent in leisure, recreation or rest – with a fourteen hour work week six days a week (including sleep in leisure).

In a future post, we’ll compare these numbers with the ‘average American’ ratios for work and leisure – though I’ll tease you by letting you know that ‘technically’ we work more – but then, we haven’t defined work OR leisure yet – which could certainly turn things on their head.

Leisure and the Gospel: Zadok’s Labor and Rest

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the nature of rest related to the unique work of prayer which we engage in as intercessory missionaries at IHOP-KC. I’ve had the opportunity to engage in some discussions related to our revised absence policy – and thought it would be a good topic to examine critically over the next few weeks.

My basic premise is this: we have no idea how much time we spend ‘resting’ and how little time we spend ‘resting well’. When I say ‘we’ I mean myself as well. One would be hard-pressed to deny that we (in America) live in one of the most privilaged, entitlement-driven, self-serving cultures in human history. Because of this fact, I think an honest examination of the actual quantity AND quality of or leisure can only lead us further into the grace of God.

The question, ultimately, comes down to how the Bible defines work and labor and how the Bible defines rest, recuperation, and leisure, but before we get into the discussion as it relates to the Bible – I’d like to simply look at a few of the basic facts.

-the IHOP-KC missionary lifestyle - by the numbers -

The average IHOP-KC missionary – (we’ll call him ‘Zadok’) – has a ‘work-week’ of six days, assuming he takes one full Sabbath day off a week.

(6 x 52) = 312 ‘work-days’ a year

Then we subtract Zadok’s 21 personal days (any day off where he misses a scheduled sacred trust prayer meeting).

312 – 21 = 291 days

So that means Zadok is ‘working’ 291 days a year – (this assumes that he uses his 21 support/ministry days to do ministry and raise support – which certainly counts as work).

So Zadok ‘works’ 291 days a year (about 42 weeks), and he ‘rests’ an average of 74 days a year (about 10 weeks). Of course, there may be those who have all of their prayer meetings scheduled scheduled within a span 4-5 days – which would change these numbers radically – but we’ll stick with Zadok’s schedule for the sake of simplicity.

So, by the numbers about 80% of his days are spent working and about 20% are spent resting.

These numbers are a little deceiving, however – since every moment of those 291 days isn’t spent ‘working’ – within each day we spend a certain percentage of time working AND resting.

More numbers on that later.