Our granddaughter, Sarah, loves to have Donn give her “rides” on his office chair. At her request, he wheels her around the corner to the uncarpeted kitchen and dining room area, always stopping at the “library” (a bookshelf with mainly my books) to allow her to select books. On every trip, she chooses three books, always picking one to give me.

One day some months ago, Sarah handed me a daily devotional book by Joan C. Webb which I hadn’t read in a long time. I glanced through it, remembering that it had been a very good book, and decided to read a page a day for awhile.

What I read on Day 4 took my breath away. It was titled, DEATH BY OVERWORK, using Luke 9:25 as the reading selection: What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet…forfeit his very self? I closed my eyes. Ever since Robb became involved in the furniture liquidation business, I had been increasingly concerned at the unbelievable number of hours he worked.

I opened my eyes and began reading the first paragraph of the devotional. “The Japanese have a name for it. It’s called karoshi, or death by overwork.”

Having lived in Japan for four years, I was familiar with this word and the concept. I was aware of the havoc the long working hours played with family life and marital relations. One of my students told me, “When a Japanese man retires, he wants to join in his wife’s life, but it is too late. We have a saying in Japan, Retired men are like wet leaves, very hard to get rid of.”  A sad commentary on the results of overwork for those who live to retirement age.

Ms. Webb continued, “Many have sacrificed family life as well as their own lives. According to some reports, the death toll from overwork has been as high as ten thousand per year. These people are driven by corporate leadership to routinely work overtime, take little or no vacation, work weekends, ignore physical signs of stress, and never complain. The heartbroken families have recently begun to say that the price for gaining the world’s admiration is too high.”   

The day after I read this devotional, Robb posted a picture of his time card on Facebook, boasting that he’d worked 110 hours that week. His friends applauded him. With the devotional I’d just read firmly in mind, I stared at his post. What to do or say? At last, I posted this message: I have a word for you, my son–karoshi. It’s Japanese. Look it up. Whether or not he ever did, I don’t know.

The night Robb was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, he told his father and I, “For the past three years, I’ve believed I was invincible.” Sadly he discovered that the lifestyle he’d adopted to enable him to keep up this pace did not make him invincible, but was the perfect recipe for esophageal cancer.

So what would drive Robb or anyone else to adopt this sort of lifestyle? Ms. Webb says, “Some of us overwork to obtain economic superiority. Most of us overwork to prove our value, desperate to gain approval and respect.” She says we would do well to learn from the human disaster going on in Japan due to death by overwork and ask ourselves some difficult questions.

• Are you and I forgoing healthy relationships with our spouse, children and family for the sake of our work addiction and perfectionism?
• What is your rationale for obsessive work habits?
• Is it worth the price?

I told a friend recently, “There’s a saying that goes like this: Change is painful, and until the pain of staying the way we are becomes more painful than the pain of change, we will not change.” Unfortunately, when the pain of staying the way he was became more painful than the pain of change, it was too late for Robb. I pray that if you’ve adopted an unhealthy lifestyle to enable you to work an unreasonable amount of hours, whether to obtain economic superiority or to prove your worth and value, you’ll learn from his experience and make whatever changes are needed while there’s still time.

Father, help us realize our worth and value comes from being created in your image, not from what we do. Amen.