'The Holiness Of Your Work

Ephesians says God prepared good works for us in advance — but it never says those works have to look churchy to count. Most people quietly sort their week into two piles: the sacred hour on Sunday, and everything else - the errands and meetings and invoices that just have to get done regardless. Paul's sentence doesn't build that wall between the two. It doesn't say "prepared in advance for you to do at church." God has prepared good works within and beyond the walls of the church.

Lester DeKoster, who spent a career writing about the theology of ordinary work, put it in one sentence that stuck with me: "Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others; civilization is the form in which others make themselves useful to us." Nobody applauds the person who kept the water running, the roads paved, the accounts balanced, the shelves stocked before the store opened. That's exactly the point being made. The usefulness is real whether or not anyone claps for it, and civilization itself is just the sum total of a great many people doing precisely that, mostly unnoticed, every single ordinary day.

Dennis Bakke ran a global energy company on the same conviction that the purpose of his business was never the money. It was stewarding what he had to meet the needs of his employees and those they serve. His philosophy wasn’t complex involving 10 rules and dozens of strategies. He said outright that he built the whole company on principles established in the garden - not in a business school. In Genesis 2, God placed humanity in a garden and told them to "work it and take care of it". A schoolteacher grading essays at her kitchen table at ten at night and an accountant closing out a small-business owner's books so a family can make payroll aren't doing something separate from their faith. They're doing the good work God prepared in advance for them. They are in the right place at the right time ordained by God to do the right thing. Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others.

What's the unglamorous, unapplauded work in your week that's actually holy work, whether or not anyone ever notices it?

Blessings,

Dr. Joanthan