This is just the first part of a two person conversation about the nature of work and how it relates to our Christian faith. Did I say “two person”?  Why, yes I did — Dave will be talking blogging about it too.  Right here.  On this blog.

I’m not sure why Dave wants to do this, since he already thinks that I’m insane.  But no matter.

This is all his fault, really.  He invited me to a new thing his pastor has started called “Second Tuesdays” where a bunch of people who work downtown will be getting together once a month and discuss how our professional life and our spiritual life intertwine.  At our first meeting, the pastor challenged all of us with a definition of work.  It turns out that Dave and I have been struggling with some of the same ideas, and these meshed with what Second Tuesdays are all about.  So how our jobs mixed in with our faith.  Or is they?  Can we work in the secular world and bring God’s Kingdom with us?  This is what this conversation is about.

When we think about work, it’s easy to just see it as either parts of an extreme.  It’s either “just putting a roof over your head” on one side, or it’s all-consuming, “this is what and who I am” from another.  The former means that it doesn’t really effect your life.  Working, then, is what interrupts your time between when you wake up in the morning until you get home in the later afternoon on the weekdays.  But you probably think that your real life is what happens when you aren’t at your “day job”. Your passions lie elsewhere, but you have to pay the bills.  But your passions don’t do that.

On the other extreme, your life is your work.  It defines who you are.  Some people can’t get enough of it, and work until way into the evening, whether it’s still at the office or connecting to work from home.  When you talk to another person, you quickly switch the subject to work because that is where your passion is.  And, really, maybe the only think that you know anything about.

I waffle between those two extremes.  I think it’s my duty as head of the household to provide for my family anyway that I can.  But I am passionate about my work.  I like talking about what I do (for the few people that will listen ) and I generally like what I do.  That said, I don’t think either one of those extremes are how God wants us to view work.  In fact, I don’t even think God wants us on that scale.

But what does God want from us in the workplace?  Well, I’m not sure but I know what God values the most from us, and that is relationships. God values our relationship to Him (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind”) and our relationships with each other (“Love your neighbor as yourself”).   Neither of the extremes I talked about earlier fit into those categories — because they are all about yourself, not about God or other people.

What does this mean?  I’m a computer programmer.  They don’t usually let us talk to other people, right?  Well there are the people that you work with.  “No man is an island” and all that.  I think that the relationships and interactions that have with people really shape who we are.  And our relationship with God even more so, in ways that we probably don’t even realize.

What I am saying is — it’s not what we do that makes us who we are, but it’s the who we meet that forms us, and shapes us.  And God and Christ are in that “who” if we walk in their ways.  What we do is less important than who meet when we are doing it.

So then we go out and make relationship with people we work with?  I would say that you have relationships with people you work with, whether you realize it or not.  They can be positive or negative, close or distant.  But everyone you meet and have to talk to in a day, you have a relationship with.

And then there are relationships for a larger purpose.  Look at Dave and myself.  We ride the same bus in the morning to our jobs (for different employers) and right the same bus back in the evening.  We usually spend an hour a day together, tops.[1]  We could have been quite our first few months on the bus (and we were) but after a few conversations we found out that we have similar interests and backgrounds and have become friends.  If just one of us weren’t working downtown, and taking the same. And do we attribute that to ourselves?  By no means!  That is God working.

So why do we need to work?  Doesn’t the Bible say God will take care of us?  Why yes. But the Bible also says that we are to use our talents and abilities.  I have unique talents, Dave has unique talents, and you, gentle reader, do as well.  I think it’s a sin to not use them.  And, since our culture is one that we have to work to participate in in it, we need to use what God gave us (our talents) to be in our culture.  Because our faith in God and Christ should effect everything that we do, it should also effect our work, our talents, and the people that we encounter.

This is the end of my post, but not the end of our conversation.  And I’m just beginning to grapple with all this and what it can mean.  Dave will be the next up to bat.

[1] But, then again, a lot of days I don’t even spend an hour with my wife.

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