Do you wake up every morning thinking of how God will work in the lives of your friends and coworkers today?
Sometimes I go to work excited for what would happen that day. We will complete a project, or receive some recognition. Maybe Friday excites us. Other times, I look forward to lunch with a friend. Or I enjoy the work scheduled for the day. Maybe, I expect a large check, or some other recognition. Maybe I will spend time with people I enjoy. I regularly look forward to my workday for reasons like these.
Other times, I dread work. Often, I don’t like the work on the schedule. The people I work with do not share my values or my expectations. Some coworkers only want to do certain activities or as little as possible until quitting time. Would I have to work with a problem client again? How much farther behind would our project fall today? Why can’t we find a way to agree and work together? Maybe my boss or our customer is dissatisfied. Why is everything so hard?
In two paragraphs, I went through a fairly broad spectrum of the events of an office-based workday. We have meetings and deadlines. We create reports and emails or we react to reports and emails. We think, edit, help, coach, encourage, talk, and write. Others of us may not work in an office. We build things, fix things or tear things down. We drive, ship, deliver, load, and unload. We design, code, solve and analyze, monitor, evaluate. We work. We all know what it means and we spend huge chunks of our lives working.
The above contains no reference to God. When I’m honest, I can go hours at work without thinking about or talking to God. Can you? Has your time with God on your mind been increasing or decreasing lately? What do you do to keep God first in your workday? What would you recommend to friends like me who struggle with this? Share your ideas below and check out my recent posts on how we can avoid practical atheism. Let’s help one another keep God first and to work with him in our work day. Are you in?
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash