Tags: creation, Lavender, vocation, work
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on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Formation.
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As we more fully embrace BAM and find our business taking off, I’ve been thinking about this question of work. It feels right and good to work in the community just like the people we want to reach. It can also be exhausting and make us wonder if we’re spending our time well, since not every moment is spent in traditional missionary activity. It seems more honest in a lot of ways. We are just people who want to follow God, who have been called to do so in a dark place. There are plenty of people–including missionary kids–who don’t know that missionaries actually work because our schedules can be odd and the fruit of our labors somewhat intangible. But as business people, no one questions our role in society or our commitment and need to work. I kind of wonder if this is how we should have been doing things all along. It’s tiring and stressful, but it also feels right at the end of the day.
Great piece and beautiful picture. I’ve been cleaning out a very junkie closet this morning and not liking it one bit. Such is a touch a life when our house also is office, campus ministry center, things left behind by kids……etc. I need to keep the goal in sight. Work is very OKAY and God seems to like it!
Bob, Sandie probably likes it as well.
True enough, Mike:-)
Not all work is good. Work is incapable of being good when it is corrupted into drudgery. This is often the case when the work is divorced from its proper end, that of producing something good or valuable or useful, and reduced to subservience to some intangible thing which is not directly related. This is usually profit, but can also be a means to something else such as leisure, freedom from work (in the future for the self or the present for someone else), respect, or an ephemeral happiness that is not rooted in anything. This is work that might otherwise be good, but it is held in bondage. In most cases, the worker has no choice. The bulk of the workforce are drones in factories and offices. Some choose work that is drudgery because by doing it they can obtain other benefits which they desire more than what they can gain from meaningful work. This may be a form of insanity. Work as drudgery is nothing new, and has been around since humans first learned that they could dominate other humans, but it has become the norm in our society, and is to be expected when an economy is no longer concerned with producing goods and instead shifts to producing money.