Too Many Hours and Too Much Debt

"It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labor, for he gives to His beloved even in his sleep." Psalm 127: 2

How do we know when we are in the pitfall of business bondage? Does long hours at work classify us as being in bondage? At times, our work just demands that we spend many hours at the task. 

I remember a few years ago meeting the person who was CEO of IBM Canada. In our conversation, he related to a group of us how his job was so demanding.  We asked him for his thoughts on the challenges of being a CEO of a large corporation. We talked for some time and he gave us many thoughts to consider. One of the thoughts that stood out the most to me was his perspective on managing his time. He relayed to us young business owners that one of the biggest challenges in operating any business was to not let it consume us. He told us how he set specific work hours for every week and he did not vary from this commitment except in rare emergencies. His work week consisted of forty hours.

Many of us fall into the trap of working long hours. For some, fifty or sixty hours are standard work weeks. We tend to think it won't get done if we don;t spend the hours. We want to succeed and feel this is necessary to attain success, and besides, we feel it is demanded of us, and many times it may be. 

We also can just love our work. I like to tell people my blood flows with sawdust, mortar, and dirt. Unfortunately, that burning satisfaction can upstage other loves in our life to the point we begin to place the love of work over the love of family, rest, and spiritual matters. My dad was one of those who loved his work. On many occasions when vacation time came around, he told us he had to stay in town to "get it done". He was always in the office on saturday mornings. I grew up with this mentality, although I never gave up a week at the beach or skiing in Colorado.  But I did think I was suppose to put the long hours in because it was what we did as business people.

Too much debt may be another indication of business bondage. "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lenders slave."Proverbs 22: 7 We can fall into the trap of thinking that debt is the way to build our business. Borrowing money can become the way to fix the problem. Being a homebuilder in the past, I have seen how easy it is to start another home just to get the first draw in order to catch up on the outstanding bills. Many a person has gone out on a financial limb to start or expand a business only to end up looking straight into the eye of the bank taking everything they owned. The Bible does not prohibit us from borrowing money, but it does give us some strong warnings and guidelines. It is one more time where we find God's principles against the principles of this world.