There is a 100 per cent chance you will return home at the end of today, in fact for some of us, given a small chance in the middle of a workday to head to the house, we will grab it by the horns.
Image by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pixabay
But homes too require work. And it’s not simple work. (Except for a few of our single friends who never mind a dirty cup near a pair of dirty socks all night long)
Anyway, my friend, Ivan, recently contextualized Martin Luther’s illustration on Faith and Work interestingly, he said the way God answers your daily prayer for bread, is by causing the milkman in Kiruhura District to wake up early, energizing the delivery truck driver to the diary shop near you, and eventually motivating the chef serving your breakfast – or the garbage man taking out your now-stinky milk spills every week.
Everybody’s work on this “value chain” of the Lord’s Prayer, is empowered and motivated by God, which means the work of a dishwasher at the restaurant or the palm oil reaper whose oil fried your egg this morning, matters.
Yet LinkedIn, (and the world it flames ) known for its pomp and buzzwords, tends to celebrate and platform the work of the white collar. True, the work of executives is key, yet the question persists, Who else?
Plumbers enable your shower tonight, and shopkeepers supplement your kitchen this week, yet mainstream cares less and God, more.
From vast seas to small fruits, God’s constant exclamation every time he created in Genesis, was that what he made was “good” (Gen 1:10,12,18,21,25, 31) we, his image bearers not only imitate him by prizing all work, but also remember our view of work has been corrupted by LinkedIn-like, thorns and thistles. (Gen 3:18)
A high-minded and idolatrous view of work that sees a job as a source of ‘identity’, rather than an expression of it, is a corporate golden calf waiting to pervert a disciple.
As a result, you have the work of housewives, food delivery boys and Nasser road printers, who don’t care about “editing their bio” underestimated in the grand scheme of things.
Yet the unsettling question comes up again, if all our work, like God’s, is primarily bringing order out of chaos, under whose “grand scheme” do you get your ordinary work done, yours or God’s?
So if you wear heels or a necktie to an air-conditioned office weekly, where lunch comes on time and Wi-Fi enables you to update LinkedIn. How are you tempted to think of your work (or yourself) more highly than you ought?
Our Daily work is an arena for Christian sanctification, yet we rarely connect the dots between what God is doing and what we are up to, Join a Kampala Community of Christian professionals wrestling with what it means to follow Jesus amidst our daily grind. Connect via WhatsApp here https://bit.ly/KampalaFaithatWork
