Over the edge.

I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. That’s where so many workers are being pushed these days. We labor 40-plus hours a week and the work never stops. We answer emails in the middle of the night, and 20 more are waiting for us when we wake up in the morning. Our jobs drain us, mentally and physically. We put in long days to the point of exhaustion, struggle with workplace stress, and wind up tired, irritable, and uninspired.

It feels as though our jobs are killing us.

Of course, things could always be worse. The magazine mental_floss (May-June 2005) has recently published a list of jobs that really do kill. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "timber cutter" ranked as the most dangerous job in America in 2002, with an annual fatality rate of 117 per 100,000 workers.

But even timber cutters have it better than a number of more perilous professions. For example:

Kamikaze pilots. During World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots agreed to sacrifice their lives by crashing their planes into enemy targets. Not surprisingly, this was a killer job, and nearly 4,000 kamikaze pilots died … although a few survived when they missed their targets.

And here’s another deadly profession: American president. Of the 42 individuals who have been president, eight have died in office. That's an overall on-the-job fatality rate of 19 percent. Six of the eight had deaths directly related to their job, with five being assassinated, and William Henry Harrison dying of pneumonia after giving a 105-minute inaugural speech during a snowstorm. He might have lived if he had simply known when to stop speaking.

Don’t make any comments about the length of my sermons!

Another job you might want to avoid is being a Gambino crime family boss. Since the Gambino crime family was founded in the early 20th century, five of its 16 bosses have been murdered. That’s a 31 percent fatality rate, with violent deaths coming to such colorful characters as Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia and “Big Paulie” Castellano.

To this list, we might add the category “biblical prophet.” Jonah knows how dangerous this job can be, and he is far from enthusiastic when he receives the command from God, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2). Jonah is being sent to the capital of Assyria, a powerful enemy of Israel, and is being asked to preach against it. It would be like one of us being sent to Baghdad, to walk the streets and call Muslim extremists to repent of their sins.

Just think of the fatality rate.

So Jonah bolts in the opposite direction, taking off for Tarshish in an effort to escape the presence of the Lord. He hops on a boat, encounters a storm, is thrown overboard, and is swallowed by the famous fish. Finally he is spewed out on dry land, and the word of the Lord comes to him again: “Get up, go the Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you” (3:2).

You have to give God points for persistence.

This time Jonah goes to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Still smelling fishy, he enters the belly of the beast and walks for an entire day, making his way just a third of the distance across this dangerous city. With as much courage as he can muster, he cries out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (v. 4). This stinking, sticky prophet cries out against the 120,000 residents of an enormous and powerful city, not knowing if they will hear him and heed him … or just tear him to pieces.

To everyone’s surprise, the Ninevites believe God, and repent of their sins. They proclaim a fast and put on sackcloth, young and old alike. Even the king of Nineveh rises from his throne, removes his robe, covers himself in sackcloth, and sits in ashes. He calls everyone in the city to turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands (v. 8). When God sees what they do, he changes his mind about the destruction of Nineveh, and allows them all to live.

Jonah goes over the edge, taking a killer job about as far as it will go. And what he finds on the other side is … life.

There is a message for us in this story, but it has nothing to do with accepting tough jobs, facing dangerous situations, or working ourselves to the point of exhaustion. Instead, the message of Jonah is all about hearing the word of God and obeying it. When we become obedient to God – even after a time of running in the opposite direction, as Jonah did – we find that our efforts result in life, not death. Regardless of what career path we are pursuing, obedience to God can open up new possibilities for renewal and regeneration.

New life comes from obeying God, even when we’re in a killer job.

Keep in mind that Jonah’s primary problem was one of willful disobedience. When he originally turned and headed for Tarshish, he was disobeying a direct command of God. Father Mapple, the preacher in another great fish story, Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, points out that God often speaks to us in commands, because he knows that what he wants of us is difficult. “If we obey God, we must disobey ourselves,” Mapple says.

Jonah disobeyed God, and this led to the near-death experience of being thrown into the sea and swallowed by a fish. But when he turned and showed obedience to God, then he discovered life for himself, and for the people of Nineveh. Renewal and regeneration came when he did the hard work of being obedient to the Lord.

The problem with obedience is that it is a tough sell. I tell you to “be obedient,” and it sounds like I am asking you to eat your vegetables and exercise 30 minutes a day. There’s just nothing exciting about it, nothing to get you pumped up and inspired. But like good nutrition and exercise, obedience can enrich and even extend your life. There is nothing more deadly than poor eating habits, inactivity … and disobedience to God.

Think about it. Disobedience can be seen in sexual promiscuity, which destroys lives both emotionally and physically. I recently read a memoir titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book that really impressed me with its raw honestly. In it, twentysomething author Dave Eggers describes a number of sexual encounters, and he admits to his lingering fear that he has somehow contracted AIDS. Death is “never dignified,” he tells an interviewer, “always brutal.”

Disobedience is displayed when you cheat on your taxes, and fail to pay your fair share toward the defense of our country and the support of its citizens. Now it’s certainly true that nobody enjoys paying taxes, but do you really want to live with the anxiety of facing an IRS audit? And can you truly feel good as you withhold money from the War on Terror, and from medical programs for low-income children?

Disobedience is found in lying to your friends, whether you embellish the truth or engage in wholesale deception. When you fail to be a truth-teller, you lose the trust of people around you, and shatter the strands of accountability that hold a group of people together. Lying is a deathblow to community, whether you are part of a circle of high school friends or a team of coworkers.

Promiscuity, cheating, lying – these are the authentic killer jobs. They rise out of disobedience, and are incredibly destructive.

So, what’s the alternative? In a word, obedience. It’s not an especially exciting approach to life, but it’s far less painful than the suffering and stress that can come from being disobedient to God. In fact, it has some benefits that are positively life-enhancing.

In terms of sexuality, the people most likely to report that they are very satisfied with their current sex life are married people with traditional sexual ethics. This data, from a recent telephone sample of 1,100 people in the United States, contributes to a growing body of research linking sexual satisfaction to harmony, faithfulness and permanence in marriage.

When it comes to paying your taxes, remember the inscription on the Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Washington. No, it’s not Dante’s line, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Instead, it’s what Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society.” When we resist the temptation to cheat on our taxes, we are being responsible members of a truly remarkable society.

And when you feel lured into lying, just remember how much easier it is, in the long run, to be honest. The best part of telling the truth is that you don’t have to worry about remembering what your story is.

So, even when you are feeling pushed to the edge, it is always best to be obedient to God. It leads to enrichment instead of exhaustion, satisfaction instead of stress, renewal instead of wreckage, life instead of death.

As far as tough jobs go, there’s nothing perilous about this profession. Amen.

Sources:

“401 KO’ed: Jobs That Kill,” mental_floss, May-June 2005, 13.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick or the White Whale (New York: The New American Library, 1961), 57-58.

William R. Mattox, Jr., “The Hottest Valentine,” Mennonite Brethren Herald, http://old.mbconf.ca/mb/mbh3704/mattox.htm