Laziness is clearly condemned in Scripture (e.g., Prov. 18:9; 21:25), while awareness of limitations and finitude is commended as wisdom (e.g., Ps. 90:1–12). Laziness is the shirking of duty and the prideful assertion that I won’t do that. Accepting my limitations is the humble acceptance that I can’t do that.

Yesterday, while dressed in my typical uniform of sweats and a T-shirt, and while reclining as comfortably as possible after staying home from the gym to take a morning nap, I announced a self-judgment to my wife, Gayline: “This is a lazy day for me.”

Playing judge and jury over myself, I interpreted a recliner, sweats, not going to the gym, and an inactive life alongside an active wife as laziness. 

Almost as quickly as my conscience condemned me, the Spirit comforted me, enabling me to blow the whistle on my whistle-blowing conscience for its allegations of “laziness.” My self-judgment was, in fact, false. I’m not lazy but limited. The difference matters.

Truth About Me

Though I’m told regularly that I don’t look at all sick, I’m a very sick 64-year-old who has cancer of a stage 4, not-long-for-this-world variety. Doctors can’t or won’t say how long I have—but their hinted prognostications all fall well within the “less than five years” range and quite possibly far less. I’m told my cancer cannot be cured and that our best hope (unless our Heavenly Father intervenes as only he can) is it might be temporarily slowed.

So my self-assessment of laziness was imposed on a man battling with a body impaired by cancer and its treatment. Even though I look healthy on the outside, I’m desperately ill on the inside, which makes it a fight to get and stay out of bed, never mind go to the gym.

This means, contrary to outward appearances and circumstantial evidence, it wasn’t a lazy day for me. It was a limited one. I might have looked lazy, but I wasn’t. For it wasn’t that I could do important things but didn’t. It was that I couldn’t do those things and therefore didn’t. The former is laziness. The latter is limitation.

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