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Faith and Work

Faith and work were meant to go together. You can be on mission in your everyday life and work, both on the job and at home.

Why Work?

If you won a hundred million dollar lottery tomorrow, would you quit your day job?

If you quit, what would you do with your time instead?

A volunteer who works with retirees once told me about a friend of his, a hard-driving executive who loved the Cubs. He always wished he had more time in between his work commitments to make it out to Wrigley. After decades of the corporate grind, he had saved enough to retire in style, with season tickets.

But it turns out you can only watch so many baseball games. Six weeks after retiring, he was back at the office.

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Where Does My Work Make a Difference?

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, conversations about the tradeoffs between remote work and work in the office have intensified. These tradeoffs are usually framed in terms of power, preferences, and productivity. We talk about the power struggle when employee preferences and employer preferences conflict. We talk about how work arrangements affect the enterprise as a whole, and whether working from home works.

These ways of framing the conversation have their place, but they don’t show the whole picture. For one thing, workers whose jobs can’t be done remotely often get ignored. Whenever the topic of remote work comes up, my carpenter/general contractor uncle quips, “They haven’t figured out how to make my job remote yet.”

And for those of us who seek to follow Jesus, there’s another dimension to the conversation that we need to consider: How does where I work serve God’s purposes in the world? Does where I work make a difference in loving God and loving my neighbor? Or, to put the same question another way: Where does my work make a difference?

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When Can I Work? When Can I Rest?

Are you tempted to do too much work, or too little?

An honest answer to that question will vary from person to person. Some people are disengaged at work—they’re giving less than their all to work, even during work hours. Others are workaholics—they can’t disengage from work, even during “time off.”

Between these two dysfunctions lies the elusive experience of being highly engaged at work, but free to rest when not working. You’re present at work and work hard, and you’re present to a life outside of work and rest well.

For followers of Jesus, an honest self-assessment about our relationship with work is a vital element of our relationship with God. In his teachings and life, Jesus explains and models what working and resting with God can look like. When we see both work and rest as aspects of our union with God, it transforms both.

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What Work Can I Do Best?

The calling that all of us have is not to an immensely fulfilling job, but rather to live our life with Jesus in whatever job we have. It’s true that investment bankers and chemists and editors can do their work with spiritual depth and beautiful fruit just as much as missionaries or pastors. But it’s also true that bus drivers and shelf stockers and janitors can do their work with spiritual depth and beautiful fruit just as much as investment bankers and chemists and editors. It’s not the job that makes the difference, it’s Jesus.

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Who Are You Working For?

At first it might seem like working a job for the sake of what we get out of it is inevitable. Would you still show up to your job if you didn’t get paid? But there’s a shift in attitude that can bring immense freedom to the way we do our work. We do work “for ourselves,” but in a roundabout way. Doing our work for the sake of others ends up working to our advantage, because it makes us into the kind of people we truly long to become.

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Photo of a faucet with water running.

Plumber on a Mission: Caleb Iler of Journeymen Plumbing

There were a couple times when we tried to take the keys back from God like, “No, no, we’re gonna control this.” And then one of us would stop and go, “Hang on. What are we doing right now? And why are we doing it?” Then we’d stop, refocus, hand the keys back to God. And boom, the week would be booked out. And it’s just like—Wow, it’s really cool what God does when you just trust him. This whole season of our life has just been,”Trust God, it will be okay.” It’s really cool to see him move in that.

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Evangelism at Work

When I talk with other Christians about evangelism, the practice of sharing the good news of Jesus, I find that the topic can spark anxiety. People are often confident about how not to do evangelism, but not about how to do it in a way that makes sense for their context. For most of us, the main context where we get to know people of different spiritual perspectives is at work. But the challenges of guilt, awkwardness, and timidity can hold us back from starting spiritual conversations that count with our coworkers. What could it look like to share our faith in the workplace in a way that’s joyful, emotionally intelligent, and confident?

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Justice at Work

It’s our conviction and experience that God has done right by us that allows us to do right by others. We could sum up the pattern of justice we see in Scripture like this: Because God is just to us, we can learn to be just, too. That just character is made manifest in both interpersonal relationships and in how we address larger social systems.

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An altar and cross with a laptop, wrench and spanner, and journal superimposed on it

Giving Up Your Job for Lent

I know that when I consider making time for spiritual practices like prayer, the first thought that comes to mind is, “But I’m so busy!” Of course, one of the main things I’m always busy with is my job. This week, I had planned to do an after-work prayer time on Monday, but somehow I found the work project I was wrapping up kept me late at the office. Not extremely late: Just forty-five minutes, enough for me to run out of time for prayer before the rest of my evening responsibilities started.

Experiences like this can reinforce the sense that my job is a problem, a barrier to the kind of life with God that I want to live. It’s easy to imagine that if somehow my circumstances were different, making time for prayer and other spiritual practices would be easy. Giving up my job for Lent sounds kind of nice.

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Beautiful Work

Not all of us do literal craftworks in the visual arts. The gift of the Spirit is universal for those in Christ, but the specific work we do is particular. As Paul writes in, “There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord” (1 Corinthians 12:5 NIV). Although it’s not explicit in the text, I think a case can be made that the different kinds of service are different kinds of beauty. Isn’t there something beautiful about good work, done well, regardless of what kind of work it is?

We get at this broader idea of beauty when we describe someone’s efforts as “beautiful work” even if it isn’t artistic work. Beauty includes the idea of wholeness, goodness, or excellence—not just aesthetic or artistic beauty as such. What if any work we do well and wholly are as pleasing to God as a beautiful sonata or painting?

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