Week 2: God’s View of Work
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Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. 1 Corinthians 7:17, ESV
In addition, if you do have a paid job, God may call you to other unpaid work. Your job brings in the money necessary to feed, clothe, and house your family, but your unpaid work might be the thing that brings you the most joy—and helps others, too.
Hobbies are an excellent example of this. You might write, paint, act, play a musical instrument, sing, bake, lead a youth group, volunteer at your library, clean up a stream, build model airplanes, or play pickleball—all of these could be one of your callings. Many times, these hobbies can be vital to our overall mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical well-being. These creative endeavors also allow us to serve and bless the wider community with our talents too.
We should also recognize our vocational calling partners us with God and his ultimate plan. As St. Augustine put it in the fifth century, we should “pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.” Your career might seem of utmost importance when you’re a high schooler or college student, but in reality, God’s more concerned with how you work than where you work. For instance, we serve our heavenly Father best when our work is infused with integrity, honesty, mercy, grace and justice to all with which we come into contact.
When we shift our focus from the exact nature of our jobs to the one who has given us this work, we become true partners with God in our work. If you’re struggling with seeing your work as a partnership with God, then consider these questions:
How you answer those and similar questions will give you insight into how you view work. We must be careful to do all of our work as unto the Lord, not just the bits that make us happy or are easy or bring us acclaim.
I’ll close this lesson with something I learned from my late father as a child and carried with me into adulthood about work. My dad grew up dirt poor on a small family farm in rural Kentucky, and he worked hard all his life. But what I gleaned from watching and listening to him talk about work wasn’t that hard work was important—it was that any task was worth doing well. My dad took as much care in sweeping our deck of leaves as he did chopping wood for our wood-burning stove. No task was too small to shirk, too unimportant to do to the best of his ability. He also taught me that if something needs to be done, you do it without waiting around to see if someone else is going to step up or if someone noticed our effort.
Those twin ideas—no task too small to do well and to do what needed to be done—gave me a sense of the value of work, one that I think God shares. We are called to do many types of work over our lifetimes, and many times, the work before us is small and needs to be done. When we truly partner with God in our work, we tackle those jobs with as much fervor and delight as we do the bigger ones.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Delmaine Donson
