Does God Want You to be Happy at Work?

It seems like happiness is a hot topic these days. I have been seeing it pop up everywhere lately. There is the blogger/book called The Happiness Project, a recent article at the Christianity Today blog on “How Money Makes Us Happy“, more articles on happiness at The Atlantic, and Guardian magazines, and just yesterday an email subject headline in my inbox that said “Can HR Software Make You Happy?” Seriously?

So it is only natch that sooner or later, some observant and clever consultant will come along and connect all the happiness dots to our jobs. Enter Gill Corkendale, a London-based executive coach who has written a wonderfully thought-provoking article called “Should Work Make Us Happy?” at her Blog on the Harvard Business Press website. In it, she refers to a couple of books on the subject: “The Pleasures and Sorrrows of Work,” by Allain De Bottom (which I am about 1/3 of the way through), and a soon-to-be-released title called “The Joy of Work?” which is coming out in October. Yes, the question mark is there on purpose.

Gill tees up a fair question from all this happy-talk: Do we expect too much out of our work? It is still called “work,” after all.

The question of whether we should derive happiness from work is a good one, and I believe at the core, it is a spiritual question. Which opens up all sorts of possibilities: Does God want you to be happy at work? Or, we could ask it from another direction altogether, Does God want you to be unhappy at work? Does he even care? Is happiness even the right metric for us to be focused on to begin with?

As for me, I have worked hard all my life (under mostly happy conditions) to get to the point I am at right now, where I am very happy with my work: I like what I do; it is aligned with my gifts and personality; I feel like I am doing something important; I think that I am able to help people with what I am doing; and to top it all off, I get paid well for it. I always thought that this is what God wanted for me all along.

I don’t have the authoritative answer to these questions, of course – at least not at the moment since I am rushing off to another meeting at work. But you guys are pretty bright. And theologically inclined, too. What do you think?

Does God want us to be happy at work?