The Mission Central Blog

As I type these words, I’m sick. I tested positive for COVID yesterday morning. My body ached all day Wednesday, and my wife was hacking and coughing all that night, with a fever to boot. We’re taking it in shifts of semi-conscious work-from-home productivity, naps, and Disney+. Why, you may ask, am I taking time to write this blog post when I am sick? Why not just take a sick day, rest up, and take care of myself? It’s a question I’m asking myself. Noticing how I respond to getting sick can help me get a clearer look at my inner life—my true motivations, convictions, and biases. Sickness allows me, if I’m paying attention, to grapple with my weaknesses and limitations. Sickness tells me things about myself I wouldn’t otherwise know. So, taking the time to write a post can help me clarify my own thoughts and feelings, and get the most out of this round of the virus as a learning experience. But hold on a minute. Is that high-minded, reflective pursuit of spiritual growth my real motivation for blogging right now? Or is it my compulsive desire to work even when I’m not doing well? Or, having caught up on xkcd and the r/Anglicanism subreddit, am I simply running out of sick day options for entertainment, leaving me no choice but to blog or succumb to mental turpitude? Clearly, there are a lot of possible motives on the table here.

One psychological and spiritual malady that we can find healing from at work is learned helplessness. Because this kind of helplessness is learned, it also has to be unlearned. Healing comes in the form of learning to do things that we thought we couldn’t do. This makes the workplace an ideal environment for the healing process. For disciples of Jesus, this healing is all about coming to know, in the most practical terms possible, that “the Lord is my helper” (Hebrews 13:6 NIV). He’s the one who helps us unlearn our helplessness.

Competition can bring out the best in us. The challenge posed by someone else doing excellently in our field makes us rally our internal resources. This is even true in church, where competition is sometimes discouraged. In a town with more than one preacher, the preaching is better. It has to be; people leave the churches with bad preaching and go down the street to another one! But competition obviously has a dark side, too. At its best, competition spurs us to become who we were meant to be, to accomplish things we wouldn’t otherwise accomplish. But at its worst, competition feeds our insecurity and makes us incapable of loving other people. Wanting to win can be a good thing–especially if it translates to wanting to do our best. But needing to win–to do better than others–is always evil. It twists us, wounding us, our teammates, and our competitors.

In our last post, I wrote about how shame and fear generate bricks in the backpack we all carry, putting a load on our shoulders that we were never meant to bear. Usually, there are more bricks in my backpack than I care to realize. I’ve spent much of my working life so far hiding from my shame, trying to find ways to shore up my fragile ego through various impressive achievements. If I hit it out of the park on my annual review, then I’ll be okay. If I can just pull off this next big project, then I’ll be okay. If I get that promotion, then I’ll be okay. If I can just get my coworkers to like me, then I’ll be okay. As these examples show, there’s almost always a social dimension to my achievement project. To be impressive, there has to be someone to impress, whether it’s my boss, my colleagues, or even just the people who read my posts on LinkedIn. The social dimension of ego management makes one possibility most terrifying: rejection.

All of us carry our work responsibilities with us. It’s like we have a backpack stuffed with our to-dos, pressing down on our shoulders as we move through the day. But some people, like Dallas, somehow seem to carry their backpack lightly. They still have the backpack, but it doesn’t weigh them down in the same way. They are able to set it aside and come back to it. They can give their undivided attention to the people in front of them. They are not anxiously distracted by what they have to do next. They are fully present. I’d like to be that kind of person, wouldn’t you?

For me, one of my major spiritual wounds is bound up with work. My anxiety that my true worth comes from my work is a distortion of reality, a sickness of the soul. Your soul might get sick in different ways than mine. Even so, I bet that your wounds show up in your work, too. Rather than trying to anchor your self-worth in your work output, you might be fixated on how your peers at work perceive you. You wonder if you’re really valued by the people you see each day. Or maybe you ground your sense of worth in a specific relationship or friendship outside of work. That in turn affects the energy you can bring to the work day. If your relationship is strained, your whole sense of self feels fragile, and focused work is elusive. Regardless of what our wound is, to receive healing, we must come to believe that there is a different source of worth and well-being for us. As I consider my own hurting heart, I ask myself: What could that source of deep wellness be? Of course, I’m a good enough theologian to identify the right answer: God loves me. He created me. He will care for me. The cure for my sickness of workaholic self-worth is the conviction that God accepts me just the way I am. But it’s one thing to be able to type out that sentence, and another to let the love of God saturate my soul. I need help connecting the truth of God’s love to my lived experience.

I often find it’s easier for me to think about God than to talk with God or listen to God. Even when the subject is healing, I tend to settle for thinking about healing in the right way, rather than welcoming the healing God might want to extend to me. It’s easier for me to project an image of myself as an expert in the way I speak and write about the things of God, than to come alongside others as a fellow human being in need of healing. My tendency to over-intellectualize while side-stepping healthy self-disclosure comes out in this blog as much as anywhere else. But to write this series with honesty, I’ll need to be forthcoming about my current walk with Jesus. In my own life at work, I see the grace of the healing he is bringing to certain wounds, and still feel the sting of others that are, so far, unhealed.