family

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?