Often it’s the first question we’re asked when we meet someone new, and we typically respond with the name of a job or profession, a role we’ve taken on, or a word about how our days are spent in the stage of life we’re in.
So, what is it that you do?
Back when I worked as a lawyer, most of my time involved reviewing documents, drafting reports to insurance companies, responding to discovery requests, writing motions, coding bills, and answering emails. It wasn’t all exciting courtroom drama. Like most every job, it could be difficult and stressful, and on some days, less than satisfying. Most of us experience days during which we harbor doubts about our work. For some, it’s sitting through meetings, filling out forms, or phone calls. For others, it’s the repetition or the physicality of the labor. For almost all of us, at least sometimes, there’s friction with those our jobs and roles bring us into contact. Sentiments of dissatisfaction visit almost all of us at one time or another, even when we know deep down we’re lucky to have our jobs and the array of rewards that come with them—financial, utilitarian, social.
What we often miss, though, or at least fail to acknowledge, is the spiritual reward of work. God is presented from the first page of Scripture as an imaginative Creator, laboring, crafting, inventing, producing all manner of things. Then immediately after this stirring introduction to our hard-working Creator in Genesis 1, we turn the page and see the words, “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” That is, we human beings enter onto the world stage in the role of laborers. Co-laborers, in fact, with God. The importance of work as a connection between God and humankind is expressed clearly from the start.
Again and again, the Bible tells us work is not merely a means to provide for ourselves and others, although it is that, but that it’s also an inherent good. It gives us dignity, depth, and meaning to our lives, placing on offer to us that elusive feeling we all crave, we all need, the feeling social scientists say we’re wired for: the feeling of earned success.
Earned success is the sense that comes over you, most often at the end of the day, derived from your own industry, your own earnest labor expended honestly. There are no shortcuts to it. It comes only with knowing in your bones that you worked the best you could on the tasks you had before you that day under the circumstances they were presented. You remained poised when obstacles arose. You cut no corners. You showed character when there was unfairness. You treated all those you encountered well. It doesn’t mean there weren’t disappointments and dissatisfactions, and some things were left incomplete due to time, but rather that you contended well with everything before you and are now entitled to rest. Work is the spiritual blessing that puts this beautiful possibility in your hands each day.
As a kid, I watched my father run a law firm, offering good people honest jobs and a fine place to work, securing for himself not only a good reputation but a healthy self-regard. The law, he would tell me, was a noble profession, one that required a conscientious person willing to compete in the arena of ideas, defending those in need, while upholding the integrity of a system vital to the good working order of society. It sounds grand, but it’s also true, and my memory of his words encouraged me at the deepest level when things were particularly taxing at work.
When your work is difficult, perhaps widen your imagination. Think more grandly. More spiritually. Maybe you’re not an insurance adjuster but part of a rescue plan for those in crisis. Not a teacher but a light-bearer, illuminating a path for the very young. Perhaps you’re not a geologist but a steward of creation lifting the poor from poverty all over the world. Not a repairman but one who holds rare knowledge and skills to relieve significant trouble in the lives of others. Maybe you’re not a security guard but a sentinel. Not a nurse but a savior. Not an engineer but a bridge-builder. Not a ticket taker but an ambassador. And you’re not a maid at a hotel, a construction worker, an architect, or a yoga instructor but a witness to the dignity of the human person doing what God has made you to do.
Now, what is it that you do again?
God—Thank you for the meaning of work and meaningful work to do. Amen.
