Work!

I remember the scene quite clearly. Nathan, my son, was approximately eight years old – now more than twenty years ago. He and I were participating in some gathering of his young friends. It was a group of Cub Scouts, I think. I remember that the children were reporting to one another what they might like to do when they grew up.

“I want to be just like my dad,” Nathan announced to the group, much to my satisfaction. And then he added what seemed to him an important clarification. “Except that I’d like to work for a living….”

In a few short years, and without (conscious) parental orientation, Nathan had learned some strange things about the world of work.

In the first place, it would seem, my son appeared to underestimate the “work” accomplished by his father. He could not have meant that his father wasn’t busy, I am sure. But the sort of work I did day-by-day – preaching, counseling, witnessing, teaching, and so on – must not have seemed particularly work-like in his estimation.

In the second place and at some deeper and less-conscious level, I suppose, Nathan had come to understand forestry and engineering, or scientific research (he is today a scientist) – or maybe fire-fighting, or astronauting, or garbage-collecting, or table-waiting – as professions unlike his father’s. I am a pastor in the church and a professional missionary; Nathan wanted, even then, to fight fires or study science (or maybe become “Spider Man,” if he found an opportunity.) How ever did he come to conclude that he could not “be like his dad” if he worked in a laboratory?

It was old-fashioned dualism that confused him. The world is full of it.

Dualism is an ancient philosophical perspective that has thoroughly infused western culture – including the western church (and western Cub Scouts, too). It is based upon the idea that “material” and “spiritual” things are different sorts of things altogether, and of completely different value. There are “sacred” things and “secular” things, “holy” things and “mundane” things. On the “secular” side we find bodies, buildings, medicine, art – and scientists and fire-fighters, too. On the “sacred” side we find preachers, pulpits and altars, mostly. Dualists look for God among the pulpits and altars. They do not expect him to find him in ordinary, “secular” life.

Happily, Nathan has gotten over that childish dualism. Now he is more biblical. He understands that God is pleased to sow his children into laboratories, and classrooms, and offices, and hospitals – quite as much as it pleases him to sow them into pulpits from time to time. God is the Ultimate Creator, after all. He likes it when his children create things, too – tools and clever inventions, paintings and sculptures, gardens, medicines, and classroom lesson-plans. These are not “second order” sorts of things, in a dualistic sort of way. These are outcroppings of God’s own good grace and calling.

This is a fundamental insight of “commissioned living.” We discover our “commission” in our ordinary lives: the only lives we have. There is not a Sunday life and a weekday life, after all. We are made part of God’s mission all the week through (or not at all) – wherever we are and whatever we do, whatever our gifts or profession.

God wants all of us – every one of us and every part of our lives. He wants us if we are astronauts or table-waiters; he wants us if we are teachers or preachers in the church. He wants to enlist us in his Wonderful Cause, whatever our vocation. He gives our lives a higher vocation, in fact – a calling that ennobles pulpits and laboratories equally well – a calling for all of us, yes, who “work for a living.”

It is the wonderful calling of the Kingdom. It is our calling to live for the King.

Other posts in this Elements at Our Heart series:
Work! • Witness • Word • World • Why?