I haven’t been in the workforce for all that long. My seven years are undoubtedly surpassed by most. Yet somehow I’ve already found myself consumed by it. There are many things I’ve convinced myself to pursue in the name of excellence, though few were ever asked of me. I fully recognize that no one is to blame but myself. I’ve managed to turn work into something that it was never meant to be. My ambition pushed aside what little wisdom I had. I kept saying yes, and before long I found myself in over my head. My entire life revolves around work. Even my days off exist in service to it, there to recharge me so that I can keep working. I learned how to sprint, but hadn’t considered the forty years ahead of me. I couldn’t see what it would turn me into or how it would affect my wife. I have no excuse. Neither do you.
Some, like me, have made work the center of their lives. Others see it as nothing more than a paycheck. It has also become easy to believe that secular work is somehow less valuable than ministry and therefore not as worthy. Though these perspectives look different, they all produce the same result: work is given a place it was never meant to occupy.
Let me be clear: our identity is not found in our career. We are first called to be Sons and Daughters of the Risen King. We are called to be good children, siblings, spouses, parents, and neighbors. If work prevents you from fulfilling these callings, it has exceeded its authority. But the answer is not to think less of work. The answer is to think rightly about it. Once in its proper place, it can finally become what God intended it to be: our participation in His sustaining order.
We have forgotten that work is sacred. It is the natural exercise and function of man. It should be the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium through which he offers himself to God. Every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade, not outside it. The Apostles did not leave the Word of God to make tents or serve tables. They brought the Word with them.
It is not right for us to divide our lives into the time we spend on work and the time we spend serving God. We have allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and are astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world has turned to purely selfish and destructive ends.
So what is expected of the Christian worker who must continue laboring, producing, and creating within this world of work?
“The very first demand that religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables… No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth.” — Why Work? by Dorothy Sayers
A crooked table leg serves neither God nor neighbor. Work must be good work before it can be called God’s work.
Let us see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work. When you find a man who is a Christian praising God by the excellence of his work – do not distract him. Let him serve God in the way to which God has called him. If we have any power, see that the worker is set free to do his own work as well as it may be done.
Let us shape our lives such that the nine-tenths we spend outside of the Church walls also glorify the Lord. Especially our time at work.
“I ask that [work] should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.” — Why Work? by Dorothy Sayers
I pray this theology of ordinary life forms you as much as it has me.
Nathan Schultz
Nathan is part of our Christ’s Church family and is married to Kelsey, one of our receptionists. He serves as a host on our parking team and in production. Nathan works as a Senior Production Planning Specialist at Schuber Mitchell Homes, focusing on neighborhood analysis and setup.
