WEEKLY ROUNDUP: More news to challenge and encourage about faith and work

A Monday roundup of great articles that are worth your time to read, ponder, share, or even argue with.  This week’s list:

1. Luther on Changing a Baby’s Diaper: A classic read from Luther via Gene Veith at Cranach on why fathers changing diapers (mothers, too!) is holy.
2. It’s Not All About You: From the Patheos blog What God Wants for Your Life; it’s not exactly about vocation, but it’s a larger consideration of the issues motivating posts here on the FWC about “do what you love” from Jeff Haanen, J. B. Wood, Laura Turner, and Joseph Sunde:  “…post-modernists who, fed up with the effort to make sense of the world around them, are now content with smaller worlds of meaning: work that is meaningful to me, relationships that are meaningful to me, work that is meaningful to me, and gods – if you can find one – who is meaningful to me.If that’s your metric, maybe what you are looking for is not God, but a bellhop.”
3. Save the World: Be a Plumber: Why we need Christian plumbers, and why learning a trade may be the most appropriate calling for you (with a great 1980s video-game shout-out, too.)
4. Seven Quick Takes: Delighting in the Details: From another Patheos blog, Unequally Yoked, comes this wonderful list of places where Leah Libresco has found delight in engineering, artisan and artistic practice, and good craftsmanship.
5. The Buy Nothing Year: How Two Roommates Saved More Than $55,000: How two young professionals downsized–drastically. (An interesting book on the same topic is Judith Levine’s Not Buying it: My Year Without Shopping.)
6. The Spirit of God in the Workplace: Why God’s Spirit wants to dwell in your places of daily labor.
7. Stewardship and Economic Philosophy: A podcast (with a transcript for us visual learners) of a discussion between Darrell Bock and Greg Forster on having a stewardship mindset. (From Dallas Theological Seminary’s The Table podcast; we’ve featured them before here on MISSION:WORK.)
8. Do You Need Hope to Face Your Workday? Remember the Resurrection: Part of a series at IFWE on changing the way you look at your work.
9. What is Work at Worship?  Eight principles from the Work at Worship network on how to transform your work into worship. (Really!)
10. Shopping for Soul: How a woman encountered God in the grocery aisle.  (From a whole issue of Christ and Pop Culture dealing with shopping!):

Seeing is a choice, and it’s not without a cost. That cashier who always shuts down my attempts at friendly chit chat makes me want to quit trying altogether. There’s this guy in the produce department who always wants to talk to my husband and me about his ideas of adult entertainment, which always leads me one step closer to reporting him to his manager. Once, when I said “good evening” to another man, he wouldn’t let me leave for about ten minutes without ranting about the inexcusable dearth of mango trees in Dallas. Yet I have to believe that choosing to see people and venturing to broach conversation while shopping maintains eternal significance.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells a story about when the Son of Man will return in all His glory, and both those who enter the Kingdom of God and those who must depart from it will ask, “When did we see you?”

Maybe, during that long and wonderful conversation, He’ll say, “I was at the store.”

Image: “Extra, Extra (The Paper Boy),” John George Brown. Courtesy of the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.