We think with jealousy of those people talented and fortunate
enough to be making music or art. We imagine them losing
sense of time as they work. Their worship experiences must
be divine. But we ourselves? We trudge on with grim faces.
The system needs us. And even if it doesn’t need us we need it,
to assure ourselves the security of routine paychecks.
Most of us do not get to live in an agrarian utopia. We live
among a society whose prevailing philosophies about work
are deeply flawed. Clearly, most occupations are geared
toward greed and one-upmanship, not toward creativity.
Today’s model of factories and corporations does little to
promote reverence in interacting with the world’s resources.
That’s a fallacy. To think of work only as that which gets us
a paycheck is to overlook an integral part of our role. We
are humans after the order of the Second Adam. We are to
recreate Eden. How? By resuming the dressing and keeping
of the garden. Through the work we do in this world we
can falteringly begin the restoration that God Himself will
complete in the next.
But even against this backdrop that we are to pray “establish
the work of our hands”. Even in these circumstances we are to
harbinger work as it will be in the restored world. Reminiscent
of Nehemiah rebuilding the temple, our sense of purpose and
hope should be clear to all as we do so.
As we said, the problem is multifaceted. The other part of
the problem is, we keep our boring, unfulfilling jobs for
an obvious reason. We keep them because we know that
meaningful work, work that feels sacred and communitybuilding, is difficult to find in today’s world.
The world’s systems are flawed, yes. But this does not excuse
us to hop from one job to the next like a twenty-first century
churchgoer. One could well be in the system, not because of
selfish motivations, but for perfectly legitimate reasons. Stay
if that is your case. Stay, but learn to commit what you do to
God as an offering.
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