Mark comes home from another exhausting night in the pediatric emergency room. In his mind he reviews the children’s faces, the difficult cases, the pained parents, and the good that he and his medical team were able to accomplish. It was a very hard night and yet a fulfilling night for all of the comfort and healing he was able to administer. There is however, a persistent and nagging voice regularly in his head. A voice offering a litany of... Read more
Why work? For all that the Marxist-Leninist vision got badly wrong, they got this right: work matters. And work matters because it has social meaning, even political meaning, especially economic meaning, and most importantly, transcendent meaning. Even if the Marxists got its meaning wrong, tragically wrong, they saw something that was true. Captured in their iconic symbol of the sickle and hammer, always and everywhere it is an argument that the ordinary work of ordinary human beings is at the heart of... Read more
Growing out of a conversation with business executives who have responsibility for a global corporation whose products everyone on earth enjoys, the words are becoming flesh: “The economics of mutuality.” I recently flew to Paris to take part in several days of conversation about the whys and whats of what this might look like. At its core “the economics of mutuality” is a critique of the hyper-individualism and corporate myopia of Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago “school,” which is summed... Read more
Imagine, if you will, a leader telling his followers who are living within the enemy’s walls to help them to flourish. Not to undermine them, not to resist them with force, not to plot an overthrow. Imagine that the leader actually wants to subvert the evil enemy with blessings instead of curses. That would be unprecedented. Unless, of course, God had not already told his people to do just that. God, through the prophet Jeremiah, not only tells those in... Read more
The finale of “The Office” had me laughing and even close to shedding a tear. For nine seasons, we watched as a PBS documentary crew filmed a bunch of people working in the Scranton office of the Dunder Miflin paper company. As we peered into the lives of these ordinary office workers, we could identify with them from our own office experiences. We could relate to having a boss that is so narcissistic that it makes everyone miserable. Whether he... Read more
vocation, meaning, and ethics. I had one more conversation with someone today about the vision and hope bound up with the word “vocation.” Is life about anything? Does life mean anything? Is getting up in the morning really for anything? What do we do with the days of our lives? Why do we choose to do what we do? Everyday someone somewhere wants to talk about this. Today it was a professor in Minnesota, and we had arranged to talk... Read more
What if someone told you they knew the secret to a better life? What if they shared this secret with you? They promised you would be able to concentrate better, enjoy life more, increase productivity at work, decrease stress at work and at home, and have a better sense of self-esteem. It sounds too good to be true. But researchers at Lancaster University reported these exact results from its Research Centre for Organizational Health and Well-being. In 2010, the university partnered with... Read more
If Christians are to be “missional,” then we must take seriously that our work, as a calling from God, is kingdom work. As such, it is like leaven that is mixed into the culture (Matthew 13:33), wherever we work and whatever we do. This “makes possible (the) renewal of each creational area from within, not without.” (Al Wolters, Creation Regained) James Davison Hunter, in his influential book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the... Read more
Last week I attended a meeting where a very famous sports broadcaster gave a motivational speech. Generally, I am not very motivated by motivational speakers. This gentleman, however, was sufficiently non-motivating in a way that was actually inspiring. Let me explain. Rather than hyping up the audience with animated clichés and pithy anecdotal stories that I’ve already heard before from other motivational speakers, this gentleman spoke mostly about the highs and lows of his career. The twenty minute speech was... Read more
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