Q: The book speaks about trying to find a middle ground between naiveté and cynicism.
It is naive to cling to Eden, to think that this world should be more like heaven than earth. It doesn’t prepare you for the fact that God called you to be a light in a very broken world. The challenge for us as Christians is to enter into that brokenness and glorify him, or point people to him, to bring the hope or the love of him for that broken world.
Therefore, almost by definition, we’re in a hard spot that requires, as with Daniel, extraordinary strength and an extraordinary relationship with God to be able to still honor him in circumstances that don’t make that easy.
Obviously, God gave us this longing for a better place. But we can’t confuse that with an expectation for a better place.
Q: The book says, “Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.” But isn’t that exactly how our culture shapes people to think of work and career?
It is. And there’s a piece of that that’s really true. If God gave you the ability to paint and you never try your hand at it, you’re not fulfilling what God made you to be.
Hopefully, most of us have had the experience of learning something that then enables them to fix something that’s broken or to lead people toward a good end or to make something run more smoothly. You feel an elation deep in the soul that comes from, “God made me to do this.”
But when that’s an expectation, we’ve made it into an idol. When we’re doing work because it’s about God, and I can go, “Wow, thank you, God — this really is work you would have me do,” and I’m pointing to God with it, that is a very different place for your heart to be than if you’re going, “Wow, look at me — I’m finally king of the hill!”
We’re all vulnerable to that. If we achieve any level of success in our work, we’re all vulnerable to pointing to ourselves.
Certainly, it’s not like we should just be grim and falsely humble. That’s not what we’re talking about. In our hearts, we know when we’re puffing ourselves up and when we’re saying, “All right, God. Thanks for the privilege of being able to do this.”
It’s something that we have to constantly push against — our tendency to serve ourselves rather than God.
Q: In contrast, the book talks about recovering the notion of work as a calling. How do people discern their calling?
The most practical way is to be in a community, such as your family or your church, that can give you good feedback on your gifts. Having someone else calling out giftedness or your strengths is a way to start.
There’s also no getting around time with God. In the process of determining what work you’re going to do, God requires a lot of looking out in the world and seeing what needs to be done. It requires a lot of other people giving you validation and holding up a mirror and helping you better assess yourself. And it requires a lot of self-knowledge, and the only way self-knowledge comes is through prayer.
Some of the biggest obstacles to self-knowledge are our idols. It helps to run through the basic idols that all of us are vulnerable to and ask, “Where are they present? Where are they operating in my life?”
It helps if you say, “All right. At least I’m going to put on the table that I’m status-conscious and let God talk to me about it and try to open myself to God changing me in that area so that I’m not quite so blind to the false gods that I worship.”
Q: What are the biggest obstacles people need to confront if they are to integrate work and faith?
Certainly money. You need money to put a roof over your head and be a responsible provider. But we probably all hunger for things that money can buy that are not critical to a healthy, balanced life and that only make us more captive to money.
Also power. Personally, I was probably much more drawn by the power to influence things than I was by money.
The need to be liked and the need to be needed can really get in the way. Not that you should be an unlikable leader, but when you’re just wanting to be liked, you can find yourself avoiding paths of truth.
There’s also security. Many people make career decisions for security when, in fact, calling is a risky business. Living as God’s people is a risky business. If you’re always just making choices that are secure, and not taking risk, you’re not really open to the ways God could be calling you.
Q: What can congregations do to help people with issues of work and faith?
Work should be as important in the missional focus of a church as family is.
Certainly, when you focus on family and marriage and parenting, you get many opportunities to talk about how the gospel should impact your life. But it’s at least as important that we talk about work.
God uses work as a crucible to shape and refine us. It’s a place where God wants to use us to glorify him, to point to him and to do work that serves the world. To miss it misses about 80 percent of most people’s self-concept.
The topic of calling, alone, would be valuable for a congregation to discuss. Not what specific job to take but that broader idea of how is God calling me where I am right now. What is God’s call in the work that I’m doing? Exploring that is huge.
Another way would be to pull together a group of people to study faith and work for a year and just build a cadre of people who are really thinking about this and applying it to their lives.
Q: Anything else?
Just, again, that the book takes the Fall and the brokenness of the world more seriously than a lot of “faith and work” books do.
Books that point us to just be better people are not necessarily helpful. When you look at the full magnitude of the brokenness of the world, the gospel’s a lot bigger.
The gospel is not just being a better person and us getting out there and being the hero. The gospel is about God saving the world and us being able to have hope and operate out of the gratefulness that he’s doing that.
That’s a very different perspective.
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