How Do Humans Flourish? (Questions for Restless Minds)

Danielle Sallade, D. A. Carson

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781683595076
• eBook ISBN: 9781683595083
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

"In How Do Humans Flourish?, Danielle Sallade argues that the Christian life leads to thriving. Many burden under the yoke of worldly success, resulting in stress, anxiety, and exhaustion. But true flourishing can be found only in peace, and that begins with a right relationship with God. Learn what true success looks like. Discover how you can value work rightly, find your identity in Christ, and live with an attitude of dependence on God. You too can flourish"--

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INTRODUCTION

Many people are discussing what constitutes genuine human flourishing.1 One helpful definition comes from theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff, who ties the concept of human flourishing in the Christian tradition to shalom. A flourishing life will be a life lived in right relationship with God, with one’s environment, with neighbors, and with self. “A flourishing life is neither merely an ‘experientially satisfying life,’ as many contemporary Westerners think, nor is it simply a life ‘well-lived,’ as a majority of ancient Western philosophers have claimed.”2 It is a life that both goes well and is lived well.

I have the privilege through my vocation in campus ministry of serving current university students. My colleagues and I desire for our students to mature in their Christian faith during their college years. We long for them to flourish, borrowing from Wolterstorff, in right relationship with God (through justification in Christ), with their environment (caring for their habitat and working for justice as stewards accountable to God), with their neighbors (showing mercy in the name of Christ and spreading the gospel), and with themselves (proper self-understanding rooted in adoption by God in Christ). As we work toward this goal, we increasingly face challenges from the campus-culture that work against the students’ ability to flourish. And one challenge in particular seems to affect everyone: the problem of being too busy.

The students I work with are talented, creative, and intelligent. They are full of energy, working hard in their classes and in various extracurricular activities. They are community-minded, developing friendships, keeping up with family far away, and devoting time to service with genuine care. They are wonderfully inventive about ways to have fun and make memories. But they are also very, very busy. And often because of their “busyness,” the students are stressed, anxious, exhausted, and sometimes depressed. The combination of coursework, extracurricular activities, part-time work to cover the ever-increasing cost of their education, and having a social life makes their lives very full with little margin for rest or the unexpected.

In addition, today’s students are anxious to realize their personal hopes to “be all they can be,” having been taught to expect they could realize this from the beginning of their primary education. They are fearful about their future security, and they struggle to exert as much control over their lives as possible. As a result, they are often suffering from the weight of their various responsibilities and their fears for what lies ahead. Depending on a student’s temperament, they can either be caught up in frenzied activity or overwhelmed by their lives and thus unable to do anything. The pressure in their lives keeps them from flourishing as God intended.3

This book proposes that living as a Christian, an alternative to the prevailing culture, leads to flourishing. First, I briefly sketch what the worldly culture of busyness looks like. I then discuss how our modern notions about the nature of work and success create the culture of busyness and keep it going. Finally, I attempt to show how the Christian faith offers an alternative way to understand work and success that, when believed and lived out, results in joy, peace, and genuine flourishing instead of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion.

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THE CULTURE OF BUSYNESS

Overwork and overcommitment are very common in student life, to the point of being the normal experience. Academic requirements alone can keep a student working hard through four years. But I have yet to meet a student who simply attends classes and completes the work necessary for those classes. Many students balance academics with paid work necessary to help their parents finance their education and living costs. And education costs have skyrocketed in the last decade. Though some universities can offer financial aid, many cannot, so paying tuition bills takes much hard work and sacrifice for many students.

In addition, it seems that everyone is involved in at least one extracurricular activity where a regular time commitment is necessary for purposeful involvement. This usually means activities on multiple days per week for just one pursuit, and most students are involved in more than one activity. With much to balance, students seem to be constantly on the move, going from personal appointment to class to extracurricular activities to work until the wee hours of the night (many campuses have rehearsals and sports practices that begin at 11 p.m.). The pace of students’ lives means that they will skip meals or forsake adequate rest or exercise to be everywhere they are supposed to be and to meet every deadline pressing down on them. “All-nighters” are common.

Changes in technology have also intensified the pace of life. As students move from place to place, they are on their phones or computers, making calls, emailing, or texting one another, making more plans and squeezing it all in. They constantly make and change appointments at the last minute, which intensifies the sense of running around.

Another change brought about by technology is that students now submit assignments electronically. This frees professors to set deadlines for assignments at midnight or 6 a.m. When I was a college student, students had to physically hand in papers that were due during the day or by 5 p.m, the time when the departmental office closed. As a result, this drew a clear boundary between the school day and the evening. Now professors contribute to a “work around the clock” way of life by having middle-of-the-night or weekend deadlines, thereby encouraging students to work at all times. Because work can be accomplished anywhere at any time, students feel pressure to always be working. There is a blurred distinction between day and night, and sleep schedules are often erratic.

After visiting a campus and interviewing students about the nature of college life for today’s students, columnist David Brooks observed,

In our conversations, I would ask the students when they got around to sleeping. One senior told me that she went to bed around two and woke up each morning at seven; she could afford that much rest because she had learned to supplement her full day of work by studying in her sleep. As she was falling asleep, she would recite a math problem or a paper topic to herself; she would then sometimes dream about it, and when she woke up, the problem might be solved. I asked several students to describe their daily schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-advisor duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer sessions, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more. One young man told me that he had to schedule appointment times for chatting with friends. I mentioned this to other groups, and usually people would volunteer that they did the same thing. “I just had an appointment with my best friend at seven this morning,” one woman said. “Or else you lose touch.”4

Though Brooks’s description is meant to be a generalization and perhaps slight comic exaggeration, it does ring true. The students I regularly meet with lead similar lives.

Living like this, it makes sense that when you ask students what they look forward to the most over their semester breaks, the most common answer is sleep. They push themselves hard, waiting for the time at home when they can “crash” and try to make up for the rest they have missed during classes, only to return and live the same cycle all over again. So much stress is one reason (but certainly not the only reason) that universities have documented a marked rise in the use of counseling services.5 Members of our university administration have expressed thanks to our ministry because they know that we meet regularly with students throughout each week. They recognize that with the demands for counseling increasing so much in recent years, a ministry like ours is poised on the front lines, helping the university preemptively handle the load.

With negative results like this, one would think that students would stop living without margin. But students take challenging courses and sign up for activity after activity to the point of running ragged because it seems expected. There is a strong sense that everyone is living this way and that if you do ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface (D. A. Carson)
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Culture of Busyness
• Chapter 3: Identity in Work
• Chapter 4: Depending on God in Our Work
• Chapter 5: Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Study Guide Questions
• For Further Reading