Can We Survive Reaching the Edge of Heartbreak at Work?

Gideon Strauss is the executive director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Seminary, and has been my boss twice (first when I worked at Comment, and later when I launched Fieldnotes). More importantly, he’s been a friend and mentor for a long time, and his family is very dear to my husband and me.

So it is with some deep gratitude and understanding of how well he knows this territory that I recommend his piece at The High Calling on “how to survive reaching the edge of heartbreak at work,” a subject many of us are all too acquainted with:

The Psalms offer us paradigmatic examples for our subjective human responses of wonder,heartbreak, and hope (that is, to God’s great acts of creation, judgment, and redemption) and as such show us how “to tap into the larger narrative, the bigger picture and the idea of the whole journey,” as Sooi-Ling suggests.

The statistician familiar with Psalm 19 can delight in the patterns of big data as part of creation’s song of praise to God. The corporate raider upon her first encounter with Psalm 51 may finally, harrowingly, become aware of the human cost of her plundering. The pension fund manager faced with devastation by a poor set of investment decisions (or simply the hard constraints imposed by a recession), may nonetheless find solace and encouragement in the words of Psalm 23.

Read the whole thing – it’s well worth it.