Your Work Today Matters, and So Does the Way You Do It

The new year brings with it to blogs like mine posts filled with advice on making your resolutions successful. This is a worthy topic. However, often the goals we have for ourselves involve areas of our personal lives and even of our great passions. It was true of me in my goals of 2013: read books, write blog posts, and write letters. These were (and are) important aspects to me not only being the me I can be, but the me I most desperately want to be. Our resolutions tend to come from such a place.

What is rare to hear or read about, however, is how people intend to approach their job in the coming year. Goals at times involve occupation; however, those goals are typically based on obtaining new positions or climbing some ladder. What I want to take a look at here is an improved mindset for your daily duties, whether they are your passion or not.

Work is a hard thing to figure out; or at the very least, it's proven to be difficult for our culture to balance. On one end, work is what we complain about. We trudge through, survive, grumble about our boss, punch in and punch out, always looking for something better. On the other extreme, work is our identity. It is who we are, defining how others see us and the importance ascribed to us. High school kids are asked "what" they want to be, not "who." College students are told the perfect job, and therefore the perfect life, awaits them and is owed to them upon graduation. We alternatively bow down to this golden calf and curse it's control over our otherwise happy lives.

As always, there is a different way. I just finished reading How Then Shall We Work by Hugh Welchel. Through a study of the history of the views of work both in American culture and in the Christian tradition, Welchel examines how we are called to work. The answers, which should not be surprising, ask for a focus other than the self. The book is worth your time.

I've collected some of the passages I think are best and included them below. Hopefully you find them helpful in your approach this week to your vocation, whether it be part-time or full-time, a dead-end or a dream, with the famous or with your family. Enjoy:

1) The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes up on him is that he should make good tables.

2) From T.M. Moore: “So no matter what your job, or whatever your work might be, God intends that you should devote your labors to something greater than personal interest, economic prosperity, social good, or future beneficence alone. God intends your work to contribute to the restoration of the creation, and the people in it, to raising life on this blue planet to higher states of beauty, goodness, and truth, reflecting the glory of God in our midst.”

3) Because of the curse of sin, our work will be difficult, and we will not feel God’s pleasure all the time or at the level we will enjoy in the world to come. But we should feel satisfaction and joy from doing our best with what God has given us in the place where His providence puts us.

4) Alister McGrath regarding John Calvin: “Work was thus seen as an activity by which Christians could deepen their faith, leading it on to new qualities of commitment to God. Activity within the world, motivated, informed, and sanctioned by Christian faith, was the supreme means by which the believer could demonstrate his or her commitment and thankfulness to God. To do anything for God, and to do it well, was the fundamental hallmark of authentic Christian faith. Diligence and dedication in one’s everyday life are, Calvin thought, a proper response to God.”

5)The Cultural Mandate, according to Richard Pratt: “The Great King has summoned each of us into his throne room. Take this portion of my kingdom, he says, I am making you my steward over your office, your workbench, your kitchen stove. Put your heart into mastering this part of my world. Get it in order unearth its treasures; do all you can with it. Then everyone will see what a glorious King I am. That’s why we get up every morning and go to work. We don’t labor simply to survive, insects do that. Our work is an honor, a privileged commission from our great King. God has given each of us a portion of his kingdom to explore and to develop to its fulness.”