Working When the World Is On Fire

On a Saturday morning earlier this month, Katie and I found ourselves in the emergency room with a family member. In between visits from doctors, nurses, and techs, we spent a lot of time just sitting. I had my phone with me, and turned to the news. As I scrolled through the updates, it felt like the world also needed to be taken to the emergency room. What does it look like to care for our neighborhoods and our nation in the midst of the many disturbing crises of the moment? It feels like the world is on fire, but I don’t know how to call the fire department, or where to volunteer for it.

The strange thing Katie and I face when caring for family members in ill health is how much “normal life” still goes on at the exact same time. We are in the emergency room on Saturday, but we are also planning for our normal work days on Monday. Even as I’m writing this blog post, Katie has texted me to let me know another ER trip is underway today. My brother-in-law is on hospital duty this time around, so what do I do? I say a prayer and return to writing this blog post. How strange.

Have you felt like that at all recently? You go to your normal workplace, but you also read about an overnight operation in Venezuela to remove a dictator. You answer some work emails, and then your phone buzzes with reports of ICE brutality and the detention of lawfully present refugees. What do you do? You say a prayer and return to your work emails. Perhaps you even sign a petition or attend a protest over the weekend! But then you’re back at work on Monday. How strange.

(As an aside, I tend to be cautious about mentioning political issues without nuancing them, for fear of being partisan, especially because I believe Americans and followers of Jesus can disagree in good faith about many issues. This is not a post for breaking down all the injustices of the current moment—as important as such posts are! Rather, I want to speak to those who are disturbed by those injustices, but find themselves doing “normal life” at work all the same.)

Is “Normal Life” A Betrayal?

If you’re like me, doing “normal life” can feel like a moral betrayal of our neighbors whose lives have been disrupted by injustices. At the very least, it’s a point of significant cognitive dissonance. Thoughts like these go through my mind: At such a time, is it right for us to keep following our routines, working and playing, resting and reading? Isn’t this an emergency? Shouldn’t we disrupt our lives to go take decisive action on behalf of the vulnerable? But what would that decisive action even look like?

In his wonderful 1939 sermon “Learning in Wartime,” C.S. Lewis answers such questions in the context of war arriving on the doorstep of the United Kingdom. Speaking to university students about their daily studies, Lewis asks, “why should we–indeed how can we–continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?”

Lewis’s answer for his students—and for us—is that our situation, as grave as it is, is not so unusual after all:

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. . . . We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil . . . turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.

Lewis goes on to talk about the spiritual stakes that are true of life all the time. We are, whether in war or peace, always caught up in a cosmic drama with eternal consequences. “God’s claim” on each of us is “inexorable.” (There’s a ten dollar word for the day! It means “impossible to prevent.” I first learned it when reading Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy.) The question is not whether it makes sense to do normal things like daily work or schoolwork during a crisis or war, but whether it ever makes sense to do these things if you believe in eternal, heaven-or-hell stakes in the spiritual life.

The Eternal In the Everyday

Here, Lewis reminds us of the nature of the Gospel. Jesus does not invite us to fit his offer of eternal life into our lives as they are, like an addendum or new feature. He calls us to take up our cross and follow him, to lose our lives in order to save them, to sell everything in order to purchase the pearl of great price. Jesus intends to reinvent our lives from the inside out, and his thoroughgoing renovation, in time, touches every square inch.

At the same time, Jesus does not seem to intend for us to do dramatically different things, in terms of our occupations and vocations, than other people. Lewis explains, “Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before: one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.” It’s true that Jesus called some fishermen to leave their nets and become apostles, but usually he calls fishermen to become fishermen full of the life of God. It is God’s way for his eternal life to enter in and occupy our everyday activities, not replace them. Like yeast in a batch of dough, the Gospel raises our life, but it remains human life all the same: a loaf of daily bread.

Working In Wartime

This paradox in the Gospel answers the cognitive dissonance of doing our normal work when the world is on fire. The Gospel brooks no compromise, leaves out no area of life. But the life it transforms remains, in many important respects, ordinary. Our ordinary work can carry the life-giving water of the Holy Spirit to the people around us. This is just as true when we see the spectre of war or state abuses or the crumbling of democratic institutions as at any other time. The fire department we are meant to volunteer for is the one where we already work.

Lewis does note that war “forces us to remember” death. Similarly, the present injustices in our nation and around the world force us to remember how fragile, and how unevenly dispersed, peace and liberty are. But if our work can glorify God and serve our neighbors and help us provide for ourselves and our families at any time, they can do so even now. To “join the resistance” may, for some of us at some junctures, include dramatic actions or even martyrdom. But for most of us on most days, joining the resistance against evils that God despises means doing our ordinary work the way we are always called to do it, out of love for God and neighbor, as best as we can get it done.

By the same logic, we remember that injustice is always afoot somewhere. The particular crises of the moment may simmer down, but there’s always going to be an emergency for someone, and neighbors’ whose plights aren’t in the news cycle still deserve our care. The question is not just “What can we do at a time like this?” It’s “What can we always do?” Most of us should not quit our jobs to go, say, protest full-time. But all of us should ask, “How can I make promoting peace and justice part of my habits of life?” If leading our normal lives creates cognitive dissonance because we don’t normally do anything for “the cause of the afflicted” or “justice for the needy” (Psalm 140:12 ESV), that’s what needs to change.

Do we deploy our resources, our time, our relational energy, and our social privileges for the sake of the vulnerable regularly, in and out of season? If not, we can repent of our hardness of heart today. “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2 ESV). Today is always the best day to begin anew in loving God and neighbor. It’s also a great day to go to work.