I hate writing about work
The Sanctified Imagination - Part 7
I’ve been dragging my feet on writing this particular article because, if I’m honest, it feels like a drag. Part of me wants to just say, “the work you do impacts your spiritual growth and formation” and be done.
That’s my thesis. Make it a sticker. Move on.
Christendom in the West has plenty of books on the subject of “work” with far wiser things than I could ever say. Timothy Keller wrote Every Good Endeavor and it’s probably amazing. I haven’t read it though. I avoid “work literature” like the plague.
I’m bored by it. I’m frightened of it.
I really don’t like it.
The thing is, my work usually happens to me rather than I happening to it. Most of us didn’t choose our careers, we fell into them. Our challenge is to learn to be content even when we hate what we do, but instead we all try to scramble and hustle our way out of the career hole we find ourselves in.
Yet most of the books on being content with our work are written by people who have jobs we all kinda covet (famous pastor, full time author, successful business owner, college professors who we imagine are always teaching during fall with knit sweaters, etc.).
Is there a Christian book on work written by a Walmart employee whose come to the point where they can say “Christ is enough” as they stock shelves? I would read that book.
But this is not that book.
The Shaping
Like it or not (I don’t like it) my imagination is shaped, changed, and molded by the forty(ish) hours a week contribution we make to our economic system. I’m a different man today because of the thirty-one thousand(ish) hours I have invested into various jobs (forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, fifteen years).
In my late teens, I was a door-to-door salesman and I was ashamed the whole time. I started to imagine dollar signs everywhere. People were potential paychecks. My self-loathing made me sick and I quit. I never even made a sale.
After that, I bagged groceries. It was good work, but I spent the whole time imagining the time when “my life would start” and I would have a “real job”. I laid the seeds in my imagination that would eventually grow into deep discontentment. My job, I reasoned, was only a building block to get me somewhere “better”.
I taught high school English (oh, yay, a “real” job) and it was then that I learned to slow down and really see someone. A student confided in me the abuse she endured at home, and it was a baseball bat to my head head, waking me up. That job served to make me far more mindful of the people around me, molding me into someone different.
“The world isn’t about you” is probably the main theme from those years.
This isn’t a resume and you likely get the point, so I’ll stop there.
Our work is a mold for our souls, one that shoves our Play-Doh minds into little shapes over and over again. Or, maybe it’s a bit different than that. Maybe every job comes with a small set of shapes and there is a touch of “choose your own adventure” .
Consider the sales job I worked. Where did the shame come from? Culture? Myself? Satan? Certainly not the Lord. I was not forced into the mold of shame and self-loathing. There were other ways I could have imagined myself and my work. I could have chosen to foster an imagination where I was contributing to a team, earning finances to give to the Church, or being a witness in the work place. Instead, I let thoughts of shame and disgust fester.
True, the culture created the stigma around sales and our economic system applied pressure on me to take the job because I could get nothing else, but I cultivated my own thoughts. That my choice, though it didn’t feel that way at the time. My autonomy began in my imagination, and I chose to fall into shame.
Ugh. I hate writing about work! Too many of us are not in jobs we chose, but ones we had to take because of circumstances. I don’t want to heap guilt on anyone for feeling like their job isn’t positively changing them to be like Jesus.
We may not have a choice in the jobs we work!
But the brutal reality is that we can wrestle our minds into a shape that pleases the Lord no matter the circumstance. He’ll even help us with the wrestling.
Although driving for Uber, delivering DoorDash, or working in a call center is literally wasting our bodies away each day, “our inner person is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16 NASB). At least, it can be renewed, it we engage in that process with God.
The reality is that few jobs in this life will exist in the New Kingdom to come. Many will be obsolete (or deeply changed) because they’re designed with a broken world and a corrupt economic system in mind.
Our jobs will almost never form us to be like Jesus in-and-of themselves.
Even pastoral leadership in the West—representing ministry roles many people desire—are often so metric-driven that ministry leaders are malformed into pseudo business/venue entrepreneurs prone to burnout rather than being shaped into mature disciples of Jesus prepared to endure the worst trials.
What I’m saying is that we are not called to just occupy jobs that form us to be like Jesus. Instead, our role is to partner with the Holy Spirit to think about our work in a way the pleases Him. Often, that means that we acknowledge we’re sacrificing our temporal happiness in order to meet the needs of our family and donate funds to our community.
But we should do that in that same manor that all sacrifices should be made… with joy.
Weird Note on Sacrifices
One common misconception about the Law (or, Torah) that is often taught is that it is “no longer valid”. No more pigeons need to be sliced open on our behalf, so maybe just skip over Leviticus in your daily Bible reading.
But every word of the Torah is still valid today, including all the laws given about sacrifice. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said came to “fulfill” the Law and Prophets and not abolish them. Whatever the Cross was in relation to the Law, it wasn’t the abolition of it, but the fulfillment of it.
That doesn’t mean I’m “under” the Law, but it means I serve He who filled the Law full.
Jesus became my High Priest and performed the Sacrifice on my behalf, the one which is what all the animal sacrifices pointed to. He gave His life.
Now I, as a priest of the Jesus Priesthood (or “Royal Priesthood”, in Peter’s language) also make daily sacrifices. This is how I participate in the filling full of the Law. But I do not take my offerings and lay them on the altar in the Temple to be burned up. Now, I am the Temple (well, all of us in the Church come together to form the Temple) and my life is the offering.
Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
With economic mobility waning, fewer and fewer of us will be able to change the economic circumstances we’re in. But we can choose to go to work with the intent to lay our lives down as offerings to God—our act of reasonable service to He who laid His life down for us.
If you desire to do this, you must first imagine doing it. You must think about your work as an act of sacrifice. Not in a “woe is me” sort of way (which puts you at the center of your universe), but in a “this is a small thing to do for Jesus” sort of way.
We need only tame our imaginations to dwell upon that which is true: Jesus Christ is worthy of our lives laid down before Him, even if that’s done by working joyfully at a terrible job forced upon you by economic pressures and a total lack of other options.
Grieve the circumstances, but praise the Son with a life well lived.
Where We’ve Been
We are currently in our series on the Sanctified Imagination (similar to, but different than, our series on a Theology of Video Games). Our imagination is that place in our minds in which all thoughts, images, and senses dwell (whether from ourselves or elsewhere).
Our imagination is built up of a number of “Building Blocks”, or the things we give our minds so that we can imagine the future and live into that future. A Sanctified Imagination is one that is being fed building blocks of the Kingdom and can imagine (and live into) a Kingdom future.
This article continues our conversation on the second building block, “The Activities We Participate In”.