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Good morning. Today should be back to work day, though train strikes may prevent some returning. We expect our lives to be structured on work and leisure though many of us as individuals struggle to find a balance between the two. And it doesn’t help that the distribution of work and leisure in society as a whole seems out of kilter. While some have to take two or three jobs to make ends meet, others have stopped working altogether. We’ve learnt recently that one in five of the working age population are economically inactive. Some are the better-off over fifties who no longer need to work, but there are also many more long term sick and others caring for relatives. That all makes for staff shortages, loss of tax revenue and frustration from those who want to work but can’t. The Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer sees work as much more than an economic necessity. Work is part of our obligation to love our neighbour as ourselves. I am meant, ‘to learn and labour truly to get mine own living and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me’. In the Protestant faith work is a calling. The kind of work doesn’t have to be obviously vocational, like teaching or nursing. Stacking shelves, running a business, working in IT, driving trains, answering phones in a call centre – all these are opportunities to be ‘true and just in all my dealing’, to love my neighbour, the public, the boss and any I supervise myself – and those duties are balanced by rest, worship, recreation. Work, then, is a path to holiness and integration. Yet few of us experience that balance today. Those fifty somethings who can afford to retire early may see work as a burden to be gladly relinquished, though many of them actually continue to serve their neighbours through volunteering. Some in what are often called dead end jobs cherish unreal dreams of financial success and celebrity, while others just hope to get through the working day. It’s hard to feel there is much vocation about it when you have to take on two, three or more jobs just to survive – and when much of it is low-paid drudgery with little sense of fulfilment. And then there are those who have been stopped in their tracks by debilitating illness, who would love to work but can’t. Sickness around work hits individuals. But perhaps those one-in-five lost workers signify a deeper loss, the loss of participating in each other’s good, the loss of work that nourishes the soul. We need meaning as well as money, and without a fairer distribution of work, pay and leisure we stand to lose them all.