Archives For Vocation

On May 21, 2013

God at Work: The Work of the People

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” -John W. Gardner

Jesus at the office

A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a successful business man and Highland Church member. We were talking about shared history and people that we both knew, and then we got on to the topic of vocation. And I asked my friend, does what we do on Sunday in worship connect to what you do in your job at all?

And my friend, being honest, said “No.”

Which is a shame…

In the day that Jesus was born, the wealthy Roman people had certain ideas about the universe. They Believed that the gods had made tiers or levels of people. Some were created to work in the trenches, some where created as peasants and tradespeople, and others were created for more “noble” tasks, like reading and thinking…Particularly thinking about philosophies that make thinking people more important than peasants and workers.

And into that world, Jesus is born. According to the Christian story, God enters the world, not through a school in Athens or a Senator’s tudor in Rome, but through a carpenter.

And Jesus spends 30 years learning how to make with his hands.

Idols and Work

The Jewish Scholar Nahum Sarma points out that the book of Genesis is doing so many things that we are unaware of. For example, in Genesis 4:19-22, Genesis lists off a number of random occupations and inventions. But this is more than just letting us know who invented the harp or camping. Back in the day that Genesis was written it was commonly assumed that the gods were the ones who came up with these ideas.

So the Egyptians thought that the god Thot invented the scales, and Osiris invented agriculture…but here right in the first few chapter of the Bible we read that God has given the gift of creation to people. And it appears that no matter how bad the world gets, God still wants to co-create with them.

The common way of viewing the world was that we were dependent on the gods for everything…but Genesis tacitly rejects this idea. Human history is not something we are passive in. It is something God wants to do with and through us.

One of the interesting things that I’ve learned about Christian culture over my last three decades is how much we fail to get this.

We don’t create culture, we consume it or parody it. And sometimes we say that we should engage it, but typically that just means we should “think about it” from a distance, or have a small group to talk about the movie/book/album and what ways we saw gospel undertones. Which is all well and good, but….

The one thing that I see missing today in most Christian circles is the one thing that the Scriptures are truing to give us.

A passion to create. Sometime new and fresh and innovative and good. Not just coping “American Idol” and calling it “Gifted” (an actual real thing that we did).

But the most toxic thing we did was turn our work from a way to worship to what we worship. In his book Wisdom Meets Passion, Dan Miller points out:

“The new generations want to change the world. Nothing is more frightening than the prospect of mediocrity. Yes, they may appear narcissistic-self-centered rather than other-focused.But they are looking for redemption, a cause that validates their very existence.’

Now that sounds good, but in fact it is one of the biggest problems we face as humans. Because if your work or cause is what validates your existence, you can be sure that you will only hurt your work or cause. It can’t bear that kind of weight.

Coram Deo

There’s an old Latin saying “Coram Deo” that means before the Face of God. It basically means that everything we do is done in His presence, but it also means that God is working alongside us, and that one day our work will quality control tested by Him.

Not just preachers and bishops and priests, but retailers and artists and teachers. In fact, the word liturgy actually doesn’t mean worship the way you think it does. It really just means “The Work of the People” because you are working along side God, your work is worship.

And this actually helps to explain history a bit better. Because for thousands of years this is exactly what Jews and Christians have done. We have been a compelling force for good in the world. Ethopians monks created Cappacino’s (the word comes from the Capuchin monks), We created hospitals and medicine, and explored and discovered the universe God made (in fact, now that we are understanding the Mideval ages better, we realize that Christians weren’t anti-science, if anything the reverse was true!)

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On May 14, 2013

God At Work: A Day Off

“I took off 6 days between 1978-1984″ Bill Gates

Jesus at the office

For the past few months I’ve been writing about why work matters more than we think it does. I don’t hear churches or preachers talking very much about the other 6 days of the week, and I think that’s a shame. We’ve got to re-imagine what it looks like for a Christian to work in every sector of society.

But what do you do when work turns bad?

When the President Lyndon B. Johnson was on his deathbed he told his biographer that he had wasted his life.

Which is not what you would expect to hear a former President say.

He told his biographer that he realized that what he had really been searching for was immortality, and now that he was going to die, he watched the American people absorbed in a new President, and he realized that they would eventually forget him entirely. He told her that he wished he would have invested his life in his wife and children. Because he could have depended on them in a way he had just learned he couldn’t depend on the American people.

The Addiction of Work

One counselor who works with high ranking executives recently commented on the increasing burnout she’s seeing. She said that work is the newest addiction of choice.

There’s a guy named George Cloutier who specializes in maximizing productivity, he’s well respected in his circles and this is what he says.

As far as birthdays and anniversaries. You should absolutely make note of them–but not by taking long visits to the country with your spouse or going off on weekend getaways. That’s what jewelry is for. Or treat everybody to a steak dinner. It takes less time, so you can get on with running your business. If you are not focused–if family, friends and loved ones fill up your busy weekly schedule–you are probably failing to deliver real profits for your company….Love your business more than your family–it’s not an easy or popular attitude to adopt. Often you will feel tremendous pressure to take time away from your business to devote to family matters. But in the end, the best thing you can do for them is to create the legacy of a business that is thriving and financially sound. When you’re retired, wealthy, and able to spend Valentine’s Day and other special occasions with your kids and grandkids at your winter home in Hilton Head, you’ll be glad you devoted so much of your time to your first love: your business.

And this guy is serious.

Do you know when God first mentions the Sabbath?

It’s right after the Israelites are delivered from Egypt. They were slaves for a jerk named Pharaoh, And God knows that embedded in their DNA is that they think they are slaves.

Sabbath was God’s answer to slavery.

It’s God’s way of saying you’re not in Egypt anymore.

Sabbath is God’s way of letting you know you are worth more than what you do.

So God’s command is to carve out a day when all work is done, even if it’s not.

See the truth is that Sabbath isn’t voluntary. You’re going to take a Sabbath one way or another, the only question is do you want it to be a happy Sabbath, or a sad Sabbath. Do we want it to be a Sabbath with you riding in a red car with a siren on top going very fast (that’s a Sad Sabbath), or one that you took voluntarily?

How many of us if we were honest feel like there is this weight that follow us around everywhere?

That we are tied to our Blackberry’s or our Iphones, as if our identities depended on them.

I’ve had times in my life when I’d wake up in a panic during the middle of the night because I missed an email or didn’t return a phone call.

Rabbi’s are fond of saying that more than Israel keeping Sabbath, Sabbath kept Israel.

When they were under siege in Masada, they kept it during famine, and in drought, some of them even kept it in Hitlers concentration camps. Because real Sabbath, comes from the confidence that God is able to take care of things,

That God is big enough to take be in charge of things while you take a nap.

Real rest can only come by recognizing that God is God and I am not.

But real work comes from that too.

Breaks and Bricks Building with bricks

There’s a guy named Nehemiah in the Old Testment, and when we first meet Nehemiah he is in Exile. But at least he’s got a good job. He’s the cupbearer for the King, basically it means he drinks the wine before the King does to make sure no one is gunning for the King’s job.

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On April 30, 2013

God at Work: A Better Bottom Line

“The priesthood of all believers did not make everyone into church workers; rather it turned every kind of work into a sacred calling.” -Gene Veith

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society-more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.” -Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Jesus at the office

I remember looking at retirement portfolio in 2008. I don’t get numbers, and I wouldn’t have even had a retirement plan if my more Excel fluent brother wouldn’t have forced me to. But I understood that there was a huge difference between the number of our current account balance and the balance that was there last month.

The market had crashed, like markets do, but what made this one seem so different is the widespread recognition that this crash was not just because of unforeseen market conditions, but unknown and widespread corruption.

The market crashed because we were selfish.

It’s easy to hate on Bernie Madoff and all of the bank executives with Golden parachutes, but I’ve come to look at them the way I’ve learned to look at Adam and Eve. Yeah they messed up the world for everyone else, but I’m pretty sure if I was them I’d probably have done the same thing.

Because what we are seeing is a glimpse into the human condition. Something that the Bible calls sin. And you don’t need an MBA from Harvard to be capable of that.

In fact, no matter what you do chances are you are a part of the very system that these CEO’s and exectuives were working in.

The Virtue of Vocation

Recently, David Brooks wrote an article about spending time with some Stanford students. He came away noticing that they had a pretty binary view of the world. Either you were going to make money or you were going to serve the world through some kind of non-profit or Peace Corps.

Both of these students were trying to pursue status in some form, they were even wanting to make their mark in the universe, but their imagination was too limited.

Here’s what Brooks said in his article:

“Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors. Furthermore, few students showed any interest in working for a company that actually makes products…Community service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service….In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence….Furthermore…around what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops?…You can devote your life to community service and still be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and by a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.”

Notice what Brooks is saying? Because this is at the heart of what it means to have a vocation or calling.

Remember a calling is only a calling if someone else calls you to do something and you do it for their sake and not for your own.

A calling is a calling if you are doing it as a service and not primarily from selfish motives.

This is the virtue of a vocation.

And intiutitvely we already knew this.

Working to Serve

Remember how you felt last month when you read the story about the waiter standing up against the bully of the down syndrome boy? Or what about the article about the flight attendants and pilots who held the plane for the man trying to get to his dying mother in time?

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On April 23, 2013

God at Work: Common Grace

Jesus at the office

In 2001, Perry Falwell (not to be confused with Jerry) flew into the Sudan with members of the Christian Solidarity International to negotiate the release of over 2000 Sudanese slaves. In order to fund their redemption Perry paid for it, through his work. He was the lead singer of Jane’s Addiction, and his band donated the proceeds from one full concert to save the lives of these people.

Meanwhile, my parents did not allow me to listen to their music….and I was in college.

A Thin View of Sin

Now I don’t want to get into what kind of music we should listen to. I say this because one of the chief problems I see facing churches as we move forward is our thin view of sin. This comes out in a thousand ways, but I hear about it most with the way we talk about work.

Ever since I’ve been in ministry, I’ve had people complain about how hard it is to be at work, at the water cooler and hear someone use a foul word, or to have a co-worker talk about something immoral. We say it a hundred different ways but what we are trying to say is, “It’s so hard to work around sinners.”

This comes primarily from a view of sin that has been the most popular for the past several decades. It’s sin as a list of things that you should avoid, and the best way to respond to this is by not being around sinners, or places where these sins happen.

I normally turn around and assure people, that as someone who has worked most of my life in church, it is just as hard.

Because sin is more deceitful that that. As soon as we think that we’ve got our sin problem licked, we discover (at least hopefully) that we have made pride our new sin. If we are honest we realize that our heart is an idol factory and that often we haven’t removed the sin, we’ve just replaced it with a more religious version of it.

This is why some of the worst people that you know are Christians, it doesn’t have to go with the territory, but it does sometimes. If you can get God to agree with your definition of sin, and then just stick within it, it’s very possible to never be confronted with your own selfishness.

If I’m th get to define righteousness than you will certainly be righteous.

You may not be helping to free the slaves in Sudan but at least you don’t watch rated R movies.

The Tim Tebow Problem

One of the most surprising things about the Bible is the kinds of people God works through. If you are a church person you’ve probably heard a hundred sermons about Ruth or Rahab, but on a broader level God works in the Scriptures through pagan kings and armies and rulers and centuries as a way of blessing the world. And he does this often, without “saving” them and making them a part of his people.

I like Tim Tebow…really! I think he’s a stellar guy a great athlete and a mediocre NFL quarterback. I’m glad that he’s a Jesus follower, and that he gives young men a role model to look up to. But Tebow has revealed a problem with Christianity.

What do you do when there are better quarterbacks out there who don’t believe in Jesus?

We love it in our Christian sub-culture, whenever a star or celebrity makes it to a public forum or becomes a star. But the flip side to this is that God is working through all kinds of people to make the world a better place.

Tim Keller pastors a church in Manhatten, and one of the things he repeatedly pushes his church to do is to partner with the other civic organizations and affirm them and their service in New York. So Keller, a conservative Presbyterian ministry, is constantly affirming the homosexual community for the way that they have renovated so many inner city neighborhoods and helped the crime rate, or his Jewish neighbors who have worked hard to create human flourishing in New York City. And here’s what Keller says that I think is so important:

In The Christian story the antagonist is not non-Christians but the reality of sin, which (as the gospel tells us) lies within us as well as within them. And so we are likely to be on firm footing if we make common ground with non-Christians to do work to serve the world. Christians’ work with others should be marked by both humble cooperation and respectful provocation.”

Did you catch that? The bad guy in the Christian story isn’t someone, it’s the broken reality that Jesus calls sin. And because of common grace we can see God working through people outside of our tribe, our immediate community, or our faith. We can see the image of God in everyone. Keller goes on…

This means, ironically that Christians who understand biblical doctrine ought to be the ones who appreciate the work of non-Christians the most. We know we are saved by grace alone, and therefore we are not better fathers or mothers, better artists and businesspeople, than those who do not believe as we do. Our gospel-trained eyes can see the world ablaze with the glory of God’s work through the people he has created and called.

Tim-Tebow-032112We don’t like working with people who don’t hold the same beliefs and values as we do, which ultimately makes our beliefs and values less influential in the rest of the world. And what’s worst we can’t see the glory of God in the work of the people all around us that he created.

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On April 2, 2013

God at Work: The Dirt We Kneel On

Jesus at the office

One of the more interesting stories in the Old Testament is about a guy named Naaman. He’s the equivalent of a 5 star General for Syria. He’s a big deal who serves at the right hand of the King. He’s successful, feared and respected by many. And then Naaman gets leprosy.

It’s a death sentence, and no amount of power can protect him from it.

But he gets a tip from a servant girl, that he should go to Israel and talk to a Prophet of God. Normally there is no way that he would do something like this. But this is no longer normal life for Naaman. So that’s how he finds himself in Israel, a smaller, insignificant country, that’s how he find himself asking an old man for help from a God he doesn’t know.

And it works. God restores Naaman, he heals him and gives him his life back.

But what is really fascinating to me is what Naaman does when he goes home…

Grace Works

I have a friend who has a successful career in Hollywood. If I was to tell you his name you would probably recognize him. Several times a year he has a national audience. And my friend is a Christian.

One of the struggles my friend has is how to integrate his faith with his job. He doesn’t have the ability to talk about Jesus overtly because that’s not what they pay him for. But he tries to share his faith with his co-workers, he tries to work well and be honest.

But the time he had the most Christian influence he in his job, was when he was being forced out of it. He works in a cut throat environment, where some people will do just about anything to get ahead. And unfortunately for my friend, that includes stabbing people in the back. He was working at his job, doing quite well for himself, when one of his best friends in the company betrayed and slandered him so that he could take his job.

And that’s when my friend was fired.

But everything hinged on how he re-acted. But, in what he said was the most Christlike, evangelistic thing he had did in his time there, my friend forgave them. Everyone was paying attention to how he responded, and he responded with grace. Only his two best friends knew what they had done, but everyone saw the gracious way he responded. And here’s what my friend actually said:

I’d get fired every day if it meant having the chance to forgive.

Which is not something people normally say when they are fired.

Saved by Work(s)

You know, it’s easy to be hard on the ancient monks who thought they could be saved through religious works, but so many of us today are looking for a kind of salvation from our careers. We want to save our self-esteem and self-worth, we want to justify our existence, so we take the high-paying, high-status jobs, and find ourselves worshipping them.

But the gospel frees us from the relentless pressure of having to prove ourselves and secure our identity through work, because we are already proven and secure.

Instead, our work becomes the way in which we partner and serve the God who loves us unconditionally, and a way to love our neighbor.

Which brings me back to Naaman. After he is healed from leprosy, he knows the God of Israel is the true LORD of the earth. But he also knows he is going to have to go back to his old job working with the King. And Namaan knows that the King worships the gods of Syria. The king is old and feeble and so when he kneels down to these gods Naaman knells too, and the King leans on him.

But Namaan doesn’t worship those gods anymore. So here’s what Naaman asks for:

Please let me, your servant, be given as much earth as a pair of mules can carry, for your servant will never again make burnt offerings and sacrifices to any other god but the Lord.

He went back to his old job, walking in and out of the old temples that used to mean something to him. But now it was different. So Naaman takes dirt from Israel with him, to kneel on when he goes to the Temple.

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On March 26, 2013

God at Work: Faith Works

“The priesthood of all believers did not make everyone into church workers; rather it turned every kind of work into a sacred calling.” -Gene E. Veith

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” -Winston Churchill

Jesus at the office

There’s a fascinating story in the book of Genesis, about a guy named Joseph. It’s the longest story in all of Genesis, and rightfully so. Joseph grows up in a house of brothers, but he’s his dad’s favorite. The brothers get jealous, and sell him into slavery (like you do) he winds up in prison because of false accusations and ultimately gets out because he knows how to interpret dreams.

And there is a rainbow colored coat thrown in there somewhere…you know, just in case someone ever turned this into a Broadway musical.

This story is brilliant, filled with left turns and betrayal and redemption, but one of the best scenes comes when Joseph is first let out of prison. He’s spent the last several years of his life hanging out with people who actually deserved to be in jail. They’ve got tattoo’s and they smell like crime.

But finally, after a long list of tragic turns, Joseph gets called into see Pharaoh. The most powerful man in the country. Pharaoh has been having dreams lately, and he can’t find anyone who is able to interpret his dream. And here’s where Joseph catches his break. Pharaoh hears about some guy who can interpret dreams and calls him in.

So now he’s gone from wasting his life away in a cell to standing in the halls of power in just a few hours.

Now, before you find out what he does. Think about what you would do here.

Most of us would do or say just about anything to get out of jail. But not Joseph, even after all he’s been through.

Even after all he’s been through Joseph stands in front of Pharaoh and refuses to abuse his situation. When Pharaoh asks Joseph if he can interpret dreams, Joseph tells him no. Which is not the right answer, because that’s the exact reason he’s been called up there.

But more than that, he tells Pharaoh that only God can interpret dreams. And he’s standing in a room where everyone around him thought Pharaoh was god. Just a few verses earlier Pharaoh had beheaded a baker because he didn’t like his bread. And now here’s Joseph, this dirty prisoner is telling Pharaoh that he worships another God.

Here’s why this story matters so much.

The Test of Prosperity

I did jail ministry for years, and everybody finds God in jail. I mean that in a good way. When we suffer, when we hit rock bottom it seems like we are much more attuned to God.

But I’ve also had plenty of opportunity to rub shoulders who are very successful in their life/job. And for all their blessing, they are much more tempted to not be able to see God working in their lives.

Sometimes the most dangerous place for the people of God is success.

But not Joseph. When Joseph’s moment comes he doesn’t act differently in the Palace than he did in the dungeon.

So I go to church with a couple named the Dalzell’s. They were some of the first people I met when we got to Highland, and they are some of my favorites. Joyce runs a ministry in town called FaithWorks that serves the unemployed and underemployed of Abilene. She started this ministry that teaches job skills, resume writing and helps connect people with internships that often leads to jobs.

And Dave, her husband, sells real-estate.

It’s obvious who does the “spiritual” work.

But it’s not obvious to Dave.

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On March 19, 2013

God at Work: Church Work

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust

“The first duty of a Christian pilot, is to land the plane.” -Tim Keller

Jesus at the office

For a while I’ve been passionate about helping people see their everyday jobs as vocations, as calling for ministry.

But this inevitably raises questions like why does “church ministry” matter? If all work is ministry than what is church work?

But to answer that I have to tell you about Strip Clubs in Las Vegas and middle-aged judges named Herbert.

A few years ago, Andres Martinez wrote a book called 24/7: Living it up and Doubling Down. The premise of the book is that he went to his publisher and told them that he needed a $50,000 advance to write the book…for research.

His plan was to take 50 large to Vegas and to live on the money as long as possible.

The publisher loved it.

As you can imagine the story is a bit tawdry, but at one point Martinez goes to a strip club where he says, “I never expected the highlight of my time to come in the bathroom of a strip club.”

He walked in and met Joe, the bathroom attendant, was serving the patrons by handing them towels and soaps, but Joe was also reading his Bible.

All the merry conversationalists in the men’s room suddenly fell quiet. “As if Joe was packing heat.”

“You’re reading the Bible in a topless club?” one patron asked.

“I’m a minister,” Joe replied, “this is where the Lord wants me, there’s a lot of hurt here.”

Joe had been a drug dealer for the majority of his life, and now, after a stint in prison, he had been found by Jesus. For most of his life, he wouldn’t have thought once about taking a menial, minimum wage job, but Joe had found a church, and the church had turned his job into a calling. (obviously not a calling for everyone)

G.K. Chesterton once said that, “every man who walks into a brothel is looking for God.” But that wasn’t true of Joe.

Joe was God’s way of looking for them.

The Sacred Secular

Rob Bell in his most recent book, points out that the significance of the Temple curtain ripping was huge. Because before it meant that there were places that were sacred and places that weren’t. He says:

A Temple was meaningful and useful because it gives humans a way of conceiving of the idea of the holy and sacred….Church services and worship gathering continue to have their place and power in our lives to the degree [that all work and workers do] because they remind us that all of life matters, all work is holy, all moments sacred, and all encounters with others are encounters with the divine.”

Temple Prayer

A few years ago, I spend the day with Larry James, a preacher who now runs an incredible non-profit. Larry still believes deeply in the church. because, he says, “The people who are sitting in the board rooms on Monday, and the court benches and classrooms and creative meetings on Monday are sitting in the pews on Sunday. The problem is preachers aren’t helping them connect what they do with the Gospel.”

He’s right.

I talk with accountants who don’t know that their job is a ministry. But if Jesus is right, then they see a person heart better than any counselor. I talk to mechanics who don’t see what they do as a ministry, but they give oil changes to single moms for free, I talk to carpenters who don’t see what they do as a ministry…even though it’s the job Jesus had!

A church’s job at her best is to give us new eyes to see the rest of the world, and how God is working within it.

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On March 5, 2013

God at Work: Nunc Dimittus

“There are two great days in our lives- The day we are born and the day we discover why.” -William Barclay

“The place God calls you to is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”- Frederick Buechner

Jesus at the office

In 1957, John Coltrane’s life was unraveling fast. Because of an escalating alcohol and drug addiction, the famous jazz musician lost one of the best jobs in jazz. He had hit rock bottom, when he had a spiritual experienced that changed everything.

It was the beginning of a whole new way of life. He had a profound encounter with Jesus, that changed him deeply. He was still a Jazz musician. but he began to play the same music, in a very different way.

On the dedication page of his record A Love Supreme Coltrane writes,

During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. All praise to God..This album is a humble offering to him. An attempt to say ‘Thank You God’ through our work.

The Pursuit of (Others) Happiness

Did you notice exactly what Coltrane said? He asked for God to help him make others happy through music.

Which is pretty counter-cultural for most of us. We are saturated with the idea of pursuing happiness, heck, it’s written in the charter of the American government. So we work and chase after some elusive happiness, only to find it’s always a step ahead.

And we do the exact same thing with our work.

For over half my life now, I’ve consistently asked people I meet who serve at restaurants or airports or retail stores the same question, “Do you like your job?” And I consistently hear people saying “no.” They don’t like their job because of the pay, or because of the people they have to deal with, or work beside. And to be sure, there is something to that, but a calling is more than a job.

I hear my friends and peers complain from time to time about how their job doesn’t fulfill them. But one of the most liberating things about the Biblical idea of vocation is the realization that we work for the sake of the other. God calls us, through another person, to serve other person….not primarily for our own sake.

We’re called for the sake of the world.

The Joy of Work

So about that Fredrick Buechner quote above. Buechner was a famous Christian author and speaker, and at one point he was addressing a graduating class. They were about to leave the safety of formal education for the unknown certainty of a future career. And Fredrick Buechner told them this:

“The Voice we should listen to most as we choose a vocation is the voice we might think we should listen to least, and that is the voice of our own gladness. What can we do that makes us the gladdest, what can we do that leaves us with the strongest sense of sailing true north….? Is it making things with our hands out of wood or stone or paint or canvas? Or is it making something we hope like truth out of words? Or is it making people laugh or weep in a way that cleanses their spirit? I believe that if it is a thing that makes us truly glad, then it is a good thing and it is our thing and it is the calling voice that we were made to answer with our lives.

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On February 26, 2013

God at Work: Love Works

“Divine service conducted here three times a day.”-Inscription above Ruth Bell Graham’s Kitchen Sink

“Work is love made visible”- Kahlil Gibran

Jesus at the office

When I first got to Highland Church, one of the first people who came by my office to visit me was a senior saint named Mrs. Pauline.

Mrs. Pauline is still one of my favorite people to go to Church with. She’s petite and wears thick glasses, and talks softly and unassuming. And every weekday Mrs. Pauline gets up and goes to work at the local grocery store as a bagger.

She’s not very strong, but she works hard, and people all over Abilene will wait in a grocery line just to have Mrs. Pauline bag their groceries…including me.

Miracle Work

Remember the Manna story in the Old Testament? God sends bread raining down from Heaven? It’s a great story for a children’s bible, but it’s the exception not the rule. Because most of the time in Scripture, God tells people that He will provide for them, we don’t see bread falling from Heaven. Instead, we find God immediately tapping people on the shoulder who are able to work.

God’s daily miracles are to feed the world through farmers and grocery store workers.

I think it’s interesting that the number one selling book related to careers on Amazon, is the Four Hour Work Week. I think that gives us a bit of insight to the culture we live in. We now look at work at a necessary evil that we must deal with to be able to get to the fun stuff of life. The general assumption is that work is a horrible way to spend your time, and so try and get it down to as little time as possible.

We think of work as means to an end, which means we rarely reflect much on where we spend most of our life.

But that fails to see why God gave us work. God could’ve made the world the way the Greek’s dreamed up paradise. He could have made it in a way that it didn’t need tending. But he didn’t. He made the world incomplete, because he wasn’t just creating people, He was creating partners.

When I was in college, one of my Bible professors told me about how he had employed a homeless man earlier in the week. The homeless man was panhandling, and my teacher walked up to him and said that he needed his shed painted. So the homeless man asked him how much it paid, and when my teacher friend offered $40, the homeless man informed him he could make $60 just sitting up here holding a sign. And my professor friend said, “Yeah, but you will sleep better tonight.”

And the man painted the shed.

Because we intuitively know my teacher friend is right, there is something life-giving about the right kind of work…because it’s about contributing to the good of the world.

Now most of the time when I hear people start talking about the value of work, it’s denigrates certain socio-economic classes as lazy or irresponsible. But I’ve noticed that laziness is spread evenly across the economic spectrum. For example…

Working Love Ryan-Gosling in the Notebook

After Ryan Gosling had starred in the movie The Notebook he found himself depressed and very moody. And eventually he wound up taking a job making sandwiches. Which is not what you might expect a big name new movie star to do. But what I love about this story is the reason Gosling gave for doing it.He told GQ magazine this:

“The problem with Hollywood is that nobody works. They have meals. They go to Pilates. But it’s not enough. So they do drugs. If everybody had a pile of rocks in their backyard and spent everyday moving them from one side of the yard to the other, it would be a much happier place.”

This is what our culture of 4 hour work week doesn’t understand. One of the reasons work matters so much is because it’s part of what it means to be fully human. We are given gifts to use to serve our neighbors, and working is one of the chief ways that we show and receive love.

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On February 5, 2013

God at Work: On the 8th Day

“On January 27, 1756, God decided to write music. Then He created Mozart. And God said, ‘Let there be music!’” -Robert Winslow Shaw

“The modern heresy is that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society, but only what one does to obtain money and leisure.”- Dorothy Sayers.

I don’t know about you, but among my Twitter and Facebook friends, this was the most talked about Superbowl commercial this year. In a sea of GoDaddy and Calvin Klein ads/striptease, did anybody think the the best commercial of the night would be Paul Harvey talking about the value of a farmer’s work?

One of the most surprising surveys about emotional health came from World War II. It was suprising because people that were surveyed during this period were happier than any other survey done like it…and it was during war! As they researched why this was, they discovered that the people were more happy for a season, because they were living for more than just their own survival, they were living for one another.

Happy to Serve

In his book, Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah talks about how the biggest problem facing the Western world is hyper-individualism. We have been taught to think in terms of individual choice at the expense of our ability to share life together.

And he suggests that we can change this:

“We don’t approach work with the primary intention of serving others in it…If our troubled world…is to be [helped, there should be] a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one’s own advancement.”

The way to change our self-centered individualism is to change the way we think about our work.

We live in a world where CEO’s will slowly kill their own company just to pad their pockets and float away on a golden parachute, leaving a wake of unemployed people and betrayed investors. We live in a time where a well-known bank will launder money for a Mexican drug cartel, turning a blind eye to the deaths of the thousand teenagers who will overdose. Because, hey, it’s not their teenager.

We’ve stopped thinking about what’s best for the world, and started thinking about what’s best for me. Which is, ironically the worst thing for me.

It’s also quite dumb.

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