“Work”

H,

In our brief history, and all the history we have is brief, of trying to find meaning in the things we do, we have had all sorts of approaches. There is something about working for money and meaning at the same time that never quite comes together at the same level of input or output. We were raised on the idea that it all should count. We have been told to death about purpose and calling and anointing and place and being a light or a candle or a seed or a branch or a tree or the sun. None of these things is invalid but the pressure it puts on temporary failure, at least to our own minds, can be unbearable. It may harm more than it helps.

As we face the approaching vestige of middle age, hahaha, we might be called again into that trap of wind that keeps telling us: “make it count. Stand for something. Where is thy glory.”

We should really stop listening to this voice. It has nothing to say and it leads us into spirals that also have nothing to say. This piling in on the human soul will make more villains than heroes and will not do anything to advance the cause of meaningful and glorious work that the heart seeks for. Pressure and competition may raise the bar in a corporate setting where profit and loss and, perhaps, that vague thing, “value to the consumer” rule, but they do not add value to the eternal things the heart craves for. And companies are not eternal. Nor is any duty based in these present sands.

All this is not to say inertia should rule. No on who seeks the face and hand and heart of God really thinks this. What is required is the connection between the sacred and the profane. The profane here just means the earthy, the thing here, the sand. Jesus said to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Apart from establishing the Christian reason to pay out taxes, it also speaks to giving our work the effort it demands. If we do this without strife, in honesty, growing and learning and without trying to bury anyone else, then we have applied the sacred to the profane. Then our little moments are not dull things but parts of an eternal whole. There is no such thing as ordinary work. Everything is an opportunity to live more and more in the light.

And then there is the purpose bit. The idea that our life work should mean something. What if it already does? I think we will gain more by doing our ordinary work and the things we are drawn too than in fixating on the greater destinies and impact that always lead man or woman to quick or slow ruin. History is paved with good intentions going to hell. Like ordinary love, ordinary work is the small field that connects us all together in the true sense of the word “church”. We are at the end of the era of superstars and bastions and pillars other than Christ. They very mutation and mortification of the word “celebrity” speaks to us of the dying idea that elevating one life over another due to some notoriety or “talent” has no eternal value.

Work, finally, is what God will do in us. And sometimes, through us.