H,
In our brief history, and all the history we have is brief, of trying to
find meaning in the things we do, we have had all sorts of approaches. There is
something about working for money and meaning at the same time that never quite
comes together at the same level of input or output. We were raised on the idea
that it all should count. We have been told to death about purpose and calling
and anointing and place and being a light or a candle or a seed or a branch or
a tree or the sun. None of these things is invalid but the pressure it puts on
temporary failure, at least to our own minds, can be unbearable. It may harm
more than it helps.
As we face the approaching vestige of middle age, hahaha, we might be
called again into that trap of wind that keeps telling us: “make it count. Stand
for something. Where is thy glory.”
We should really stop listening to this voice. It has nothing to say and
it leads us into spirals that also have nothing to say. This piling in on the
human soul will make more villains than heroes and will not do anything to
advance the cause of meaningful and glorious work that the heart seeks for. Pressure
and competition may raise the bar in a corporate setting where profit and loss and,
perhaps, that vague thing, “value to the consumer” rule, but they do not add value
to the eternal things the heart craves for. And companies are not eternal. Nor is
any duty based in these present sands.
All this is not to say inertia should rule. No on who seeks the face and
hand and heart of God really thinks this. What is required is the connection
between the sacred and the profane. The profane here just means the earthy, the
thing here, the sand. Jesus said to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar. Apart
from establishing the Christian reason to pay out taxes, it also speaks to
giving our work the effort it demands. If we do this without strife, in honesty,
growing and learning and without trying to bury anyone else, then we have
applied the sacred to the profane. Then our little moments are not dull things
but parts of an eternal whole. There is no such thing as ordinary work. Everything
is an opportunity to live more and more in the light.
And then there is the purpose bit. The idea that our life work should
mean something. What if it already does? I think we will gain more by doing our
ordinary work and the things we are drawn too than in fixating on the greater
destinies and impact that always lead man or woman to quick or slow ruin. History
is paved with good intentions going to hell. Like ordinary love, ordinary work
is the small field that connects us all together in the true sense of the word “church”.
We are at the end of the era of superstars and bastions and pillars other than
Christ. They very mutation and mortification of the word “celebrity” speaks to
us of the dying idea that elevating one life over another due to some notoriety
or “talent” has no eternal value.
Work, finally, is what God will do in us. And sometimes, through us.