Labour

To the woman He said: "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you." Then to Adam He said, "Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat of it': "Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, And you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return." – Genesis 3v16-19

Labour. The very sound of that word sends shivers up and down some of our spines. If you are reading this in the morning you are probably ‘looking forward’ to labour of some sort. Labour means work. Whether it is physical labour or mental labour it just means work. For some it means straining muscles and for others it means straining brains or emotions. For the vast majority of us there is always work to be done.

Then I think of a different kind of labour, and this one I hesitate to mention. For most mothers who read the title of this thought this morning another image probably came to mind. Thankfully I have never had to go through that, but I have been there for six labour and deliveries and been around loads of women in labour. My thoughts go back to when our first child was born way back in 1978. Talk about labour! Mary struggled for almost sixteen hours with her first labour. This was real effort. It was hard work getting that boy delivered. Even I was worn out and I didn’t have the baby! With our second the labour was tough because our son was quite large. At one stage I joined hands with a nurse and we pushed on the baby to help Mary deliver him. ‘In pain you will bring forth children’ rings true.

I remember some jobs I have had. One was installing heating and air conditioning systems. It involved crawling in dirty smelly crawl spaces and in incredibly hot attics. In other job I cleaned nasty, stinky, foul toilets. I understand the ‘sweat of your face.’

I am not a gardener, but recently I had to cut back some rose bushes in our front garden. Not because I wanted them pruned, mind you, but because I could not get in the car without getting scratched. That was a week ago and I still have scratches from the thorns and for several days could not work one thorn out of my thumb.

It’s obvious that all that is said here is true. Why do we have all those things to deal with? Because actions have consequences. All Eve thought about when she took that fruit was what she thought it might do for her. She did not consider all the implications. She and Adam suffered and all of us ever since have suffered as well.

The next time we are involved in some serious and heavy labour, let it remind us that sin has consequences.

Sadly, labour is relatively minor part of the consequences of choosing sin.