"Have a good weekend!" How often we hear this phrase as we stand at the punch clock in the factory or straighten up our desk at the office or school on Friday afternoon! Everyone seems so anxious to leave the workplace and to start enjoying those two days of leisure time.

Notice that people say, "Have a good weekend;" never, "Have a good week." There was a time when the week consisted of weekdays and Sunday, but today's society speaks only of weekdays and the weekend. Ask most people to name the first day of the week and they will answer, Monday, of course. Fifty years ago the answer would have been Sunday. For most people Sunday, once the day of rest, has become merely one of two days in which to relax. While God has given us one day to cease from our daily labours, modern man has "improved" on this divine scheme by giving us two. The result of this "tinkering" with God's design is that whereas Sunday was once re­garded as the one sacred or holy day, devoted to the worship of God, modern man views the entire weekend as an extended holiday devoted to the pursuit of his own interests and pleasures. The word week-end has lost its hyphen, ceasing to be merely the end of the week and acquiring, instead, an almost quasi religious status. For the masses the weekend has become the most important part of the week. Just as Christians look forward to Sunday as a time of celebrating God's saving acts in Jesus Christ, so secular man welcomes the weekend as an opportunity to spend "quality" time with family and friends.

For some people the weekend is a time of sports; for others it means time for shopping or doing household chores, going to the cottage or just "lazying" around. All these and similar activities may be subsumed under the general heading "leisure." What is leisure? According to the Oxford English Dictionary leisure is "time which one can spend as one pleases," in other words "free" time. The word leisure comes from the Latin licere which means to be permitted. Leisure time, in other words, is time we are permitted to use at our own discretion.

For most people leisure time is very desirable. In fact, ever since God said to Adam: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," man has looked for ways and means to reduce the sweat to a minimum so he can enjoy his bread in maximum comfort.

In the sixteenth century, when people worked from dawn to dusk, Sir Thomas More dreamed in his Utopia of a nine-hour work day and a sixty-hour work week. Today this dream has become reality. With a forty-hour or less work week we are even better off than the citizens of More's "Ideal Society." Today many dream of a twenty-five or thirty-hour work week, although this dream will have to be put on hold for a while due to new economic realities that are forcing themselves upon us. The much heralded Leisure Society has not arrived just yet. It probably never will. For many this is both a surprise and a disappointment. During the 1920's the workweek was reduced from about sixty to approximately fifty hours and the decade of the Great Depression witnessed an even further reduction to thirty-five working hours. There was every reason to expect that this trend would continue. Workdays, everyone thought, would get shorter and shorter. Auto­mation would eventually lead to universal leisure.

But things have not turned out quite this way. For one thing, the workday presently appears to have stabilized at about eight hours. Automation and computerization have greatly reduced jobs in certain industries, but over-all employment has increased rather than de­creased, although not necessarily resulting in the creation of high-paying jobs. Many women have entered the workforce, with the result that more, not fewer, people are working. And since housework still needs to be done, one can make a case for saying that today there is even less leisure, time than before. On the other hand, as the modern concept of the weekend devel­oped in western society, leisure time inevitably underwent a redistribution, which has resulted in a considerably shorter workweek. This redistribution, combined with more disposable income, has opened up possibilities for recreation in unexpectedly new ways — and much more frequently, throughout the year, instead of at annual intervals.

These new developments have forced society to re-evaluate the traditional relationship between leisure and work. Basically there have always been two schools of thought relative to understanding this relationship. On the one hand is the ideal — held by such thinkers as Karl Marx — of a society increasingly emancipated from labour, especially manual labour. This view goes back all the way to the Greek philosopher Aristotle who taught that the goal of life is happiness and that leisure is the state necessary for its achievement. "Happiness depends on leisure," he wrote in his Ethics, "because we occupy ourselves so we may have leisure, just as we make war in order that we may live at peace."

This philosophy is still very popular. For many people weekend activities are far more important than the work they do during the workweek. The Monday to Friday period is just an unpleasant but necessary preliminary to their real and enjoyable activities on the weekend. They can't wait to get away — to the ski-slope or the beach.

Opposed to this negative view of work is the so-called Protestant work ethic that values work as a divine calling, for which man was created and is held accountable. Work is seen as the highest form of human activity and should be its own reward, whether it be work requiring a great deal of mental energy or manual labour, factory or housework. According to this view, any drastic reduction, let alone, elimination of work, amounts to a degradation of human life which cannot but adversely affect society. Leisure is viewed with suspicion, certainly if it is not earned by toil and severed from productivity. Time off from work is not really free time, but break time — an intermission and opportunity to recharge the batteries.

It is both interesting and instructive to trace the history of the word "weekend." We first come across the term in an article featured in an 1879 issue of the English magazine Notes and Queries. "In Staffordshire," the author writes, "if a person leaves home at the end of his week's work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance he is said to be spending his week-end at So-and-so." Notice that the "week's work" is described as ending on the Saturday afternoon. This was something new. Throughout the eighteenth century the British workweek ended on Saturday evening. Sunday was the weekly day off. The Reformation of the sixteenth century and Puritanism in the seventeenth, had made Sunday the weekly holy day in an attempt to displace the saint's days and religious festivals of medieval Catholicism for which Sunday was merely one holy day among many.

While Englishmen, generally, were willing to observe the prohibition of work on the Sabbath, they did not appreciate the strictures of Sabbatarianism that frowned on any sort of merriment and levity on the Lord's day. The masses saw the holyday more as a holiday: a chance to drink, gamble, and generally have a good time.

Although Sunday was the only official weekly holiday, this did not mean that the life of the average English worker was one of unremitting toil. Work was frequently interrupted by such traditional holidays as Christmas, New Year, Easter and Whitsuntide (Pentecost). In addition, there were communal holidays associated with special, occasional events such as sporting competitions, fairs (Vanity Fair!) and circuses.

By the eighteenth century, workers had acquired "a high preference for leisure and for long periods of it." But while this was not new, what was new was that so many more people were able to indulge in it. The Industrial Revolution made it possible for workers to earn more than survival wages which left them with a choice: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work longer and earn more, or they could forego the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most opted for the latter course.

It was not unusual in those days for sporting events, fairs, and other celebrations to last several days. Since Sunday was an official holiday, usually the days following were added on. This resulted in the widespread custom of staying away from work on Monday and then working long hours at the end of the week to catch up. Eventually, this Monday holiday acquired an almost official status and was commonly known as Saint Monday. Since many public events were prohibited on the Sabbath, Monday became the chief occasion for secular recreations. Saint Monday, however, had many critics. Religious groups campaigned against what they considered an attack on the Sabbath. Supported by social reformers, they began to advocate closing shops and factories on Saturday afternoons. This gave workers a half-holiday for household chores and social activities and popular amusements, leaving the Lord's Day for worship and sober recreations.

The idea of a Saturday half-holiday also drew support from factory owners. They had little to gain from insisting on a six-day week of workdays of up to twelve hours if on some days so few workers showed up that the factory had to be shut down anyway. So they agreed to give their employees half the Saturday off in exchange for a commitment to show up for work the rest of the week.

As mentioned earlier, by the 1870s people began to speak of "week-ending" or "spending the weekend," and this practice continued throughout the rest of the century. It took many more years, however, to expand the British half-holiday to a full day off. The American half-holiday was not introduced until the 1920s, but it expanded much more rapidly into a two-day weekend. The first factory to adopt a five-day week was a New England spinning mill in 1908, but the main reason for this was to accommodate its Jewish workers. In 1914 Henry Ford reduced the daily hours in his plant from nine to eight and 12 years later he shocked everyone by closing his factories all day Saturday. His reason for doing this had very little to do with altruism. He shrewdly figured that an increase in leisure time would lead to an increase in consumer spending, for instance on new automobiles and travel. Ford's prediction turned out to be absolutely correct. The week­end did indeed become associated with outings and pleasure trips and this has been the story ever since. Once the eight-hour day arrived in 1940, the five-day workweek with two days off for leisure became firmly established.

As such, leisure time is not wrong. Scripture does allow man to relax and enjoy a good time. There is balance in the Bible be­tween work and play. God gave man one day in seven to rest and our Lord told His weary disciples on one occasion to come away to a quiet place to rest for a while. The problem is, however, that many people do not know what to do with their "free" time. Leisure time can be used in a positive and creative way, but it can also be used in a sinful and destructive way, harming both man's soul and body.

Today many people use their "free" time in this latter, detrimental way. Ours is a pleasure hungry society and never before in history has there been more opportunity for man to satisfy the cravings of his sinful heart. A whole entertainment industry (showbiz) has sprung up in this century to cater to this all-consuming desire of man to be amused or entertained. For those who choose a more active and wholesome form of recreation there is a leisure industry in place to serve them with sports equipment, recrea­tional vehicles, condos, travel packages, etc., etc.

Is modern man happier because of these things? Is he really rested up after spending a weekend at the cottage? Does he return to work on Monday refreshed and re-energized? Is his leisure time really "free" time in the sense that he is at perfect liberty to choose what he wants to do? The answer to all these questions is no. As paradoxical as it may sound, recent studies indicate that modern man is becoming enslaved rather than liberated by leisure time. Conventional wisdom, of course, tells us that it is our work that enslaves us, not our free time. But why is it then that although the average worker today has more opportunities for leisure than ever before, he does not appear to be any happier than his forbears? Part of the reason, I believe, is that today's worker, because of a shorter workweek and better pay, has to choose between taking more time for leisure or spending more money on consumer goods. Only the wealthy can do both. But the average employee is faced with a dilemma. If he wants to indulge in expensive recreation like skiing or sailing, or buy the latest entertainment equipment, like a projection TV or satellite dish, he will have to work longer hours. In other words, he has to trade free time for overtime or a second job. Statistic show that unlike those British workers in the eighteenth century who opted for more leisure time, today's workers choose consumption over time, no doubt encouraged by persuasive advertising techniques or simply motivated by a desire to possess things and to keep up with the Jones's. To pay for these "toys," more workers than ever recorded (6.2. percent) are holding two or more jobs!

Needless to say, this leaves very little time for recreation. Longer work hours and more overtime cut mainly into weekday leisure. So does commuting to and from work, driving the kids to the ball-game, and Friday night shopping. The weekend — or what's left of it after Saturday household chores — is when today's worker finally gets a chance to relax. Or does he? The weekend consists of only two days and so much has to be crowded into that short time span that it is well nigh impossible to get any real rest. The weekly rush to the cottage is seldom leisurely, what with traffic jams and road construction. Neither is the trip back very relaxing. Monday, blue Monday, is just ahead, but so is Friday, after a few days' toil, and so life goes on, the cycle recurs week after week until the curtain comes down and life's drama is over. Finis.

In this hedonistic society we live and we are not immune to its influence. We are also faced with the question how to spend our leisure time. For Christians the answer should not be difficult. As those who profess to be redeemed by the blood of Christ we should realize that also our leisure time belongs to Him. As the Lord of free time as well as working time, He holds us responsible for our stewardship of the time He gives us.

Leisure time is not wrong. It all depends how we view it, as something to which we are entitled by society or as a gift from our Creator and Redeemer. The apostle Paul reminds us that we serve a God who gives us richly all things to enjoy (1 Tim. 6:17). He gave us not only the greatest of all Gifts, His Son to be our Saviour, but with Him He has also freely given us all things, including time to relax and to enjoy pleasures out of His bountiful hand (cf. Rom. 8:32).

Christians, therefore, don't need to wear themselves out pursuing the pleasures of this life, for they know that in quietness and confi­dence shall be their strength (lsa. 30:16). They have the prospect of soon being with Christ in glory, where there are pleasures forevermore at God's right hand. (Psalm 16:11).