I was stood by the door waiting for someone else to arrive when a refugee banged on it. I was annoyed. It wasn’t opening time yet and it’s always awkward explaining that across a language barrier. I took my time coming to the door and fiddled with the key, hoping my body language would set the tone for a short conversation.

“We’re not open yet”, I said as I cracked the door open and felt the chill of the early December cold snap.

The Iranian man looked me earnestly in the eyes, thrust a heavily laden shopping bag into my hands and said in a heavy accent:

“I’m sorry, I can’t come today”.

He flashed me a grin that showed his missing teeth, leaned over to hug me, turned his bike around and rode off up the hill.

I’d known Ebrahim (not his real name) for a few weeks – maybe a month – since another refugee had introduced me to him. I’d heard rumours of his generosity, but this was my first experience of it.

I shut the door to the church against the cold, and as I locked it my mind wandered back to an interaction with John Barclay – a professor at Durham University. I was a PhD student at the University of Nottingham at the time, and he was a world-leading theologian who had been invited to give the Firth Lectures. It was as close as you come in academia to meeting a rock star.

He came to mind as I closed the door because in those lectures, he argued that one of the key reasons the first Christian communities grew was because they practiced risky generosity.

The first followers of Jesus were likely poor enough that they relied on each other to get by: you can borrow my coat today because I’m going to need your saucepan tomorrow. That was not unusual in the ancient world and lots of communities were generous in that way.

What made Christians unique was that they were much more willing to risk including outsiders – they were willing to give to people who they didn’t know well enough to be able to rely on them giving back.

I retreated from the door wondering what had just happened and whether Ebrahim would get a decent meal today if he couldn’t come to our drop in. But mostly, I wondered why he was being so generous and I was so stingy. I mean, one of us is rich by almost any metric – and it’s not Ebrahim.

As I turned round, I saw Sami (not his real name) across the room. He’s been around longer than Ebrahim and has actually been helping us by translating sermons into Farsi for other Iranian refugees. He was already inside because he was helping us today.

They show up with gratitude, and give generously of the very little they have. They practice this risky generosity with no guarantee of return.

I know a bit of Sami’s story – how he has arrived in the UK seeking asylum because his family found out about his faith and suddenly he was no longer safe in his own home. I’ve seen the scars he got from living through that story. And yet, when Sami manages to find a way to work under the radar to supplement the pittance he’s living on and make his days more meaningful, he is as generous with what he earns as he is with his time.

There’s something striking about the risky generosity I see in Ebrahim and Sami. I can’t imagine living through what they’ve endured, but they show up with gratitude, and give generously of the very little they have. They practice this risky generosity with no guarantee of return – not least because the church is so mindful of being taken in by a sob story that we make big demands before we’ll baptise or send letters of support for anyone. It challenges me. Despite the fact that I’m the rich one, my asylum seeker friends seem closer to the attitude of the first Christians than I am.

It particularly challenges me when I then read stories about small boats, Home Secretaries and Rwanda. Because somehow people like Ebrahim and Sami seem to go missing in all the debate.

I’m not in a position to solve immigration, and I’m not for a second pretending it’s not complicated. But I thought about Ebrahim, Sami and John Barclay again when my children’s CofE primary school told me what they were teaching my boys about British values and Christian values. It’s probably no surprise that there was no mention of this kind of risky generosity that was in fact a hallmark of the first Christian communities and that I think I’ve seen in these brothers from another nation. I think that’s a shame.

There’s no doubt that the Bible talks clearly about God providing for his people –wealth is not bad, and Jesus’ call to give it all away came to one particular person rather than to every follower. But God’s own generosity runs like a thread throughout the story told in Scripture.

Maybe that’s why Paul writes that ‘God loves a cheerful giver' . The original Greek word translated ‘cheerful’ there is hilaron and we get the word ‘hilarious’ from that root. It might not be funny, but within the conversation we tend to have about wealth it is surely laughable for Ebrahim to give away a bag full of goodies when he has nothing? It’s risky, certainly: better to hold onto the money as you might need it next month if the Home Office moves you without warning again. And yet, he gives.

And because he gives, he challenges me. If John Barclay is right – and I think he is – Christians have always been the kind of people who take risks to welcome others into their community. That makes no sense if you’re trying to keep your own food and energy bills down in the face of inflation. It’s laughable, in fact. But apparently, that’s the kind of giver God likes – a hilarious one!

I think he likes that kind of giver because when he looks at them he sees the image of his own generosity. After all, according to Genesis, that’s the image humans were made to carry. Seeing Ebrahim and Sami giving reminds me that for all the complexity of the immigration debate these are human beings. Their risky generosity challenges me to live up to the actual values of the first Christian community.

Snippet

Change

Digital

Work

31 January 2025

4 min read

This weekend, find something better than the busy-busy

Get the life-work balance the right way round.

Jack Nicholson

Jack is a graduate of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge and Blackfriars, University of Oxford. He writes, and also works in local government.

Two people. sitting at a street cafe amid empty tables and chairs, are silhoutted.

Krisztina Papp on Unsplash.

It was 9.38pm and I was in the library connected to Pusey House, the Anglo-Catholic Chaplaincy where I have done much of my work over the last five years, when I submitted my pitch to write on ‘work-life balance’.

‘Work-life balance’ has been up for debate recently after British businessman and investor James Watt, co-founder of BrewDog, posted a video on Instagram in which he claimed that the ‘whole concept’ was ‘invented by people who hate the job that they do.’ He went on, ‘if you love what you do, you don’t need work-life balance, you need work-life integration’. Unsurprisingly, trade unions and large swathes of the population who are not multi-million entrepreneurs disagree.

For the record, I am not a multi-millionaire entrepreneur either. Yet I should say, I disagree too, even though lately I have taken on more paid work than I have ever taken on before – possibly, too much – and I am attracted by the notion that work and life should come together in some sense. In my life, they do. And the very fact that I pitched this piece late into the evening, having tended to several competing work commitments throughout the day, and feeling rather tired all told, would suggest that I am out-of-the-running to write a worthy-read about work-life balance traditionally conceived.

I also love what I do. I am in public service.

Nevertheless, I am uneasy about James Watt’s notion of work-life integration, and I certainly object to being told by him what I ‘need’ to thrive. Work-life integration is surely problematic if it suggests that they should be completely blended such that neither work nor leisure are afforded their proper place and given proper parameters. Watt is engaged to be married and, I would suggest, the right relationship between work and life-outside-of-work ought to be more like a marriage in which each is respected and persons involved are lifted onto an altogether higher plain.

Some boundaries are crossed in this process. Others remain. Life is not lost but changed.

This is why I do not work on Sundays. Sunday reminds me that work is surely an opportunity to go out to shape the world around us, serve it, or to ‘subdue it’ (to use a Biblical phrase). However, to subdue the earth is like as to tend the garden, in which we learn to restrain ourselves to produce greater bounty (life). The first man and woman were told by God, it is said, to ‘be fruitful and multiply’. So, multiplication – or integration – is not enough. And relatedly, there are some fruits in the Garden of Eden, in the story, which God tells Adam and Eve emphatically not to eat. Most fruit trees bear more fruit than they can support. They need to be pruned. So too do our working lives from time-to-time. Work-life balance matters in this sense.

Life-work balance, however, may be a more helpful phrase in so far as the ideal life entails work; work is not a distraction from it if approached in the right manner. In the twentieth century, two Christians I admire thought as much. C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘For most men Saturday afternoon is a free time, but I have an invalid old lady to look after [at home]’, a lady called Mrs Moore. He described himself as ‘Nurse, Kennel-maid, Wood-cutter, Butler, Housemaid, and Secretary all in one’. However, C. S. Lewis also wrote that ‘The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things’, the work, ‘as interruptions of one’s “own” or “real” life.’ They nourish it. They change it for the better.

That “great thing” requires serious effort, make no mistake. The writer Thomas Merton made a distinction between a contemplative life and a life of work and wrote this:

“When I speak of the contemplative life [...] I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence. This does not mean that they are incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love. On the contrary, these all go together.

They go together, but not in the way that Watt would have it because a busy-busy existence is exhausting, not fruitful. A life-work balance is. Life and work in this equation are not multiplied but respected as each offering our souls something they need: the opportunity to be loved and to love in how we engage with the world around us.

I was glad to have an opportunity to reflect on this, however late in the day.

Hating one’s job is certainly not a requisite for understanding this. If anything, I would suggest, it was invented by people, formed by Christian values, in the nineteenth-century who hated the common life they saw around them and went out their way to protect fellow men, women, and children from overwork.

The concept of work-life balance, or life-work balance, rightly conceived, goes to the very fibre of our being, and I for one think that it should stay.

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