Our Work as Contribution
When I was in college I worked at a coffee shop for a bit. The morning rush was intense. People before their coffee, especially on a Monday–that was not the shift you wanted.
But I soon noticed how a smile and a kind word would put a little spark in people. I didn’t really like coffee, and the job was just a way to pay for school, but I started to think: “What if there was more? What if I paid attention to the crema on the espresso and the texture of the foam and treated each cup like it was a gift I was giving…what if making an ordinary cappuccino was an invitation to make love visible?”
Little by little, these ideas and actions started to catch on with my co-workers. Our regular customers started to notice, and they weren’t so grumpy in the mornings. One Christmas I got a $500 tip–no joke.
Work on any scale, whether it be making lattes or leading large companies, is never simply a means to an end. Whether or not you work for any kind of Christian ministry, work is one of the largest ways you image Jesus to the world. Instead of providing means for never-ending consumption, our work is a way to contribute to God’s vision of flourishing in the world.
Whether our work is as a student, a stay-at-home dad, a barista or an accountant, we don’t often think of work as a spiritual practice, which is odd because it’s where we spend a significant chunk of our time! We think of things like prayer and scripture reading as spiritual practices, but then we have to go to work, and the discipleship is over until the next time we can be alone to pray or read. But your work is actually your primary training ground for your apprenticeship to Jesus.
Work is the place where we work out with God and community the daily invitations we receive to become more like him: to grow and mature, to fight apathy by working with excellence, to fight overwork by carving out a rhythm of rest, to have patience when things don’t go as you want or people don’t behave well. It’s the place we learn how to handle money, responsibility and power; how to create art that uplifts and engages people rather than simply amusing and distracting them; or how to use the law to promote justice and the common good rather than consolidate power.
If you are a supervisor, you create a culture where the voices, gifts and ideas of others are multiplied instead of diminished. Work is where you learn to see that the person in your charge is not just a consuming happiness machine, but a soul with longings made to rule and reign as one who bears God’s image. Work is the place where you learn that even at its best, work is still hard and full of tedium and mundanity, and that even at its very best, work is not God…there are still thorns and thistles because “the ground is cursed.”
Our work shapes us and it matters immensely. When you go to work tomorrow, you’re not just a consultant, a policy analyst, or a student. You are a partner with God, taking the human project forward as an act of service and worship to the God who made you. In all of this, your work becomes a way you love God and bless others.
When we do our work motivated by love as an apprentice to Jesus, we become a people whose motivation is not to serve the twin gods of accomplishment and accumulation, but instead to become a community of contribution whose service and generosity of blessing lead to the flourishing of our workplaces, our neighborhoods and our city.
