Living in the DC Metro area it is easy to feel guilty that my work is not my life. More often than not, I find myself around people who are “married to their job” or gain their personal definition by what they do for a living. Walking around in a sea of overachievers is exhausting and begs questioning about the marriage between man, job, and God. What is the balance between godly dedication to our call and neglect of margin in our lives? In Os Guinness’s book, The Call, Oswald Chambers says the following: “Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ.” It is here that I find the gray area between being dedicated to our calling and having competition with our walk. Though Chambers’ quote should be the measuring stick by which we assess our priority on work, we are wise to investigate the purpose behind the place God has called us to spend a majority of our days.
The following is a list of three of the best known teacher movies: Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers Diary. Each is a compelling story of a teacher who looks beyond obstacles and gets an unlikely, and sometimes unwilling, group of students motivated to learn and do the impossible. This is the lifeblood of the calling of a teacher. Within these films though, there is a subtle secondary message, which shows that in order to do this, it takes everything you have. In each of these films, we see the characters struggle with health problems, issues in their past, and even divorce. Certainly, giving everything means sacrificing something. And this is where I get stuck. Stuck between expectation and reality. Stuck between giving my work to God and slowly being defined by it. And, stuck between what makes sense on paper and what God might be leading me towards.
Work is so interesting when viewed through a godly perspective. It’s one of the few arenas where we are in one location for a long amount of time. To think that work life could be lived without a posture of intentionality or worship is probably ridiculous. This, however, can be burdensome when work becomes difficult because we do find it challenging to find a purpose in our practice when the weight of work rests upon our shoulders. When we fail to find “success” in our work, do we then also lack the same before God? There is no denying that we are to be invested and evangelical to our co-workers, there are no questions about if we are to give our best, and there are no exceptions to our response to unfair or difficult situations. In Jerram Bars article, Work: A Holy Calling, he notes that “we are called to be faithful, submissive, and respectful even in difficult situations.” Godliness is our call and we are accountable to God for the work that we’re doing. This is further confirmed in Bars’ article when he poses this at the reader: “Christ Himself will ask us how we worked. Were you faithful? Did you work hard? Are you someone who just worked to please other people or did you work with genuine righteousness? That is the challenge to all of us in our work, and in every area of our lives.” This question make me pause and wonder, “How would I answer?”
So then, where is our accountability to the life we live between Monday and Friday? And who pushes us towards righteousness in our work as well as in our private life? Are we, as Guinness suggested, “willing to lead an examined life, travel with those who use the same signposts, and associate with all those who long for the same home?” The affirmative of this is what carries us through our call to work, which aids in our strength and resolve to “do it well” in all arenas, and questions who and what we work for in our lives. Work is not a means to an end. Work is a means to please our Savior. And, work is a venue where the word becomes flesh and we see the Lord both challenge and reward us.
Though I am encouraged to know this, I admit I am discouraged by how I feel about my work on certain days. To quote Guinness again, “Our faith is a pilgrim faith essentially at odds with place and settlement.” This makes the sometimes repetitive and pedestrian parts of our “calling” challenge us with apathy, resentment, and pride. We see that much of our pilgrimage journeys through lands laden with emotions. As with much in our walk, we note that feeling is not a pre-requisite to obedience. We’re not asked how we feel about obedience, we’re simply called to do it swiftly. Considering our work, in which we continually don the robe of a disciple, we are reminded that we “are obedient to the call of Jesus only insofar as (we) are prepared to pay the cost.” Thus we can conclude that our work is not only part of our call, but also part of our cost. To honor and worship the Lord through what we do is difficult when we know that we must sustain it for a long period of time, but the same can be said of our faith walk. Sure, we will be met with failure along the way, but work, along with life, is lived in the shadow of grace and a God who wants to love us through growing us.
