Redeeming Our Work

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Swinging open the kitchen door, I almost swung back out again. A skillet flew past my nose, and an answering saucepan flew a few feet farther in, lower and slower. The older brother had worse aim.

The two sons of the resort owner were fighting in the kitchen. Again. My first thought was to turn around; my second was that I had to get through this to pick up my order and get it out to the table warm. I ducked and ran. I was small and fast, and I needed the tip.

Though the volatile kitchen at the resort scared me, it was better than the summer I spent working at Long John Silver. Tips were good, when the diners were sober. At least there were no fryer burns involved.

Working my way thorough high school and then college meant restaurant work every summer—the only option in our small blue collar town.

I hated restaurant work.

Why don’t we like our jobs?

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Less than fifty percent of Americans like their job. In our continuing discussion about the Garden, the Fall, and other words important enough to merit capitalization for theological purposes, work matters from the very beginning. Like relationships, it inherits one of the greatest consequences of sin. The two things we most often find our identity in—family and career—are dealt the greatest post-Eden blows. Funny that, huh?

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3)

Humans not only don’t like their work, they appear to be destined to that dislike. Most of us are far removed from a life of sweating and digging for our food, but the reality remains—if you want to eat, you need to work. And work, according to over fifty percent of us, is disappointing.

Why?

Work sometimes merits this dislike

There are, to be sure, rotten aspects of he current state of work in America. Young people, even with college educations, often cannot find jobs that offer them longevity, health care, or a fit with their actual area of study. The gig economy hits them the hardest, and not surprisingly, they more often consider their jobs to be bad ones than older workers do.

Racial and gender bias cause minority and female populations to be more dissatisfied as well, given that they do the same work for less pay and are hired less often based on their skin color or gender.

Dead end jobs haunt us more than they used to when people could expect to climb the corporate ladder and move steadily upward.

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More people want and expect their work to mean something, not just put in time. That’s not a bad thing for a Kingdom-minded person to want and expect.

These are valid reasons to hate a job. I will not discount them with condescending statements like, “When I was your age,” “Just pay your dues,” or “Be happy you’ve got a job.”

We all long for our work to mean something, and there’s a reason for that.

Work as blessing

The first work was part of the first blessing, just as family and community were.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Genesis1.28-31)

Work for the first humans meant joy. God created the Garden as a temple of sorts, sacred space where we could live with him and do what fulfilled our purpose. Work served as an extension of our being, a way of living in God’s likeness. Take this land. Reign over it as I would. Tame the animals. Spread this good garden over the earth. Be as I would be in this place, and it will give you meaning.

Ruining that first relationship ruined our work, too. It’s been a battle since to find that meaning again.

Work redeemed

Yet if Christ came, as mentioned last week, to renew all things, work, the first thing humans were set to do, must be among those things. Renewal and restoration of our work life must also be part of the promise. But how?

I think it goes back to looking at that original and doing some detective work. What about it can we take away to find the blessing in our work?

The original blessing of work

First, God meant work to be a a partnership. Adam and Eve both received the commission to reign. They both heard the word to create a people who would work together to form the garden in the world.

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Yet so much of our work today is done in solitude, or at least in self-imposed loneliness. We’re stuck in our cubicles, not considering that work could be more of a blessing if it was more of a community. But those boogeymen we talked about last week—fear and shame and pride and power—stick their noses up in the workplace as well.

• We’re afraid to cooperate with others because they might steal our promotion.

• We’re worried our ideas might get shot down and we’ll be ashamed, so we don’t offer them.

• We’re intent on consolidating our own power and position and leverage so much that we miss the opportunities to listen and learn from others.

• We’re fearful that there won’t be enough room at the table for us, too, if others succeed, and that scarcity mindset sends us into a spiral of self-fulfilling insecurity.

Second, work was done in the garden for the fellowship with God. That we could relate to God while we’re working seems foreign to most of our thoughts. Even more foreign, maybe, is the idea of bussing the table, typing the memo, or changing the diaper for His glory.

We’ve divorced God’s original intent and linked work to success, money, power, dreams—with the result that our identity is linked to our success and happiness and not our relationship with God.

Third, God intended work to spread blessing in the beginning. Does our work do that? How could we make it so?

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Now what?

Some of our jobs truly do stink. I can’t deny that. Yet in the middle of them, it seems we could still look at these three parts of the original plan and find a way to redeem them. Even as we plan and hope and pray for better.

• If the work seems meaningless, maybe the purpose is to bless rather than be blessed.

• If the work is boring, maybe the plan is to ask God into it, practicing his presence, as Brother Lawrence would say.

• If the work feels lonely, maybe God meant for us to focus on supporting others’ work, refusing to believe the lie of scarcity, partnering with others outside of our tiny workspace.

It’s like evil to aim at the things most dear to our hearts and minds—family and work. It’s like Jesus to take them back for us and give us back the garden offer.

He can make work very good again.

God’s Good Plan for Relationships

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If you’ve heard me speak, you know one of my “things” when I talk to parents is natural consequences. Not that I was too great at this as a parent. I’m a 5w4 Enneagram, and that 4 kicked in pretty tight when one of my kids wanted empathy for a situation she had gotten her own self into.

I enabled just a little more than I ought to have. Because that’s what happens when you feel every feeling your kid does. It’s kind of a handicap in this parenting gig.

Some of us teach from what we’re brilliant at—some of us teach from our mistakes. At least I learned from them and I’m willing to share that knowledge bountifully.

You can be like God–How’s that working for you?

As we talked about creation a couple weeks ago, we all know “the rest of the story.” The world didn’t remain a place of wonder and joy. It still is—we just have to look harder and be intentional about finding it.

The gloriously created humans chose being god rather than being like God. The serpent offered the latter—a cruel twist of the reality that this was precisely what we already were—images of God like him. (Read the story here.)

But humans understood the real offer on the table—we could be the ones in charge. We could make the rules. We didn’t want to settle for being like God—we wanted his job description.

It’s the consequences of that choice that I’ve been delving into lately, connecting all the dots of what happened in the Garden and why it matters so deeply to us even now.

Because it really, really does matter. Just hold tight to see why.

The first consequence: Relationships

To the woman he said,“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3.16)

The first consequence of sin is that our most precious relationships—spouse and children—will suffer rupture and pain. It’s no coincidence that the first blessing and commission God gave also revolved around our most important relationships.

“Be fruitful and increase in number.”

As soon as God created humans, he gave them their first job—create community. Glory in your relationships. Fill this world with fellow images who will all be partners in this great task of caretaking creation.

Have beautiful, fulfilling, supportive relationships.

That was the first thing to go after sin showed its colors.

Pain and Love

Family is one of the strongest ways in which we gain our identity—and ever since the Fall we’ve been craving that identity and looking for it again—sadly, often in wrong places. As God predicted (NOT mandated as some think), women in particular look for it in relationships.

The pain happens not only in childbirth—the Hebrew is greater than that tiny translation. It means the pain we feel in all aspects of this relationship—childbirth and all it entails, fear of losing a child (before or after birth), grief at not being able to conceive a child, nagging worry over that child when she is out of your sight, the eventual realization that she will not be yours forever and will have her own separate life where you are not number one.

It’s all there in that small phrase—sin entwined in our relationships makes them painful sometimes, even the best ones.

Love before the Fall meant perfect partnership and joy in one another’s presence, untainted by fear or shame. In this new world outside the garden, to love anything is to discover pain beyond anything a person has ever known, and that is both good and bad. If we know God and trust him, we embrace the pain, knowing that the love is worth it every time.

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Power Struggles and Love

The same pain enters relationships between men and women, where women inevitably lose the power match that ensues when pride becomes our go to. We desire a relationship—but it is that strong desire, that need we see in women too often to recreate themselves in order to meet a man’s approval—that results in his power over her.

As a a pastor, I’ve seen it so many times. A woman who will do anything, make herself whatever she has to, sacrifice her own identity and calling, even submit to abuse, so that a man will say he loves her. It’s crushing, and it starts here in the aftermath of sin.

God did not declare this good. Remember his pronouncement after he created humans in Genesis 1? For the first time, he called creation very good, not simply good. Humans, created equal partners in their new world, merited the label—very good.

This other thing—this inequality and ruling over by men or husbands—this is NOT what God planned or wanted. It’s still not what he wants. Creation clearly offers a picture of very good partnership—and unequal relationships are a result of a prideful attempt to be God, not God’s chosen order.

Pride and power—and their twin siblings shame and fear—have been a part of human existence since the first sin, and they are potent drugs.

Re-Creation

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Thankfully, that is not the end of our story. Christ came to make all things new. ALL things. The original blessing of God—create community and form healthy relationships—may have been horribly distorted by sin, but sin is no match for the risen Lord. He came to restore our original blessing.

The relevant question for us, then, is—

how are we doing at working out God’s original desire for human relationships?

Are we allowing Christ to work in our lives so that what God intended shines out of our most important relationships? We don’t have to be married or have children to have important relationships. That is not the point.

In our marriages, parenting, friendships, sibling relationships, work relationships, etc., where are we quashing pride and power? Where are re refusing to surrender to shame and fear?

• Fear breeds manipulation, as we tighten our control of a relationship in order to feel secure. Are we repenting of manipulation and sending it packing? Women, do we embrace the joke that tells us, “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck and she can turn the head any way she wants”? I know, it was funny in the movie, but that’s manipulation, and it has no place in a healthy relationship. Let’s be better than that.

• Are we learning to tell the truth about our needs and wants, not allowing fear to get its foot in the already-fragile cracks in our souls? Do we tell the shaming words, “you’re not worth it” to get lost, knowing we are worth it if God created an entire cosmos for our enjoyment?

• In marriage, do we refuse to separate our possessions, our money, our time, and our priorities into “yours” and “mine,” realizing that God’s plan was complete partnership, oneness, not fearful hoarding of “mine”?

• Partnership means support of one another’s dreams, callings, highs and lows. That could be a spouse, a child, a co-worker, a friend. How are we doing at eliminating the fear and pride that tempts us to envy another’s success rather than cheer it? At pushing out the shame that keeps us from fully supporting someone else, even when we feel like failures? At honestly talking those things through?

• How are we doing at smashing the patriarchy that harms both women and men through its power and shame? Oh, that’s another very long post . . .

God’s “very good” proclamation came only for humans created to partner with one another to fill this world with relationships that copied his way of relating—without fear, pride, shame, or power struggles. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if Christians chose to live in his image on those terms in this wildly selfish world?

It would be very good, once again.

Because They Promised

I know this post ran for the first time not quite a year ago. But as we celebrate Valentine’s Day, I think it needs to run again.  Because my friends, this is love. Don’t believe all the Hallmark-moment stuff. Especially don’t believe all the Insta posts and viral videos  trying to convince you that love means a flashy proposal, a giant diamond, or a wedding that costs the average GNP of a small European country.

That is NOT love. That’s branding your relationship. A marriage is not a brand.

A marriage is this. The inevitable happened since this first ran–we did lose this wonderful woman. We will not recover.

This woman. She was my mom for over thirty years. Nearly twice as long as my actual mother was. I’ve called her mom since the day I married her son. Easier, I suppose, since I no longer had one. We’ve been very different people for those thirty-some years, except in our mutual fierce love of our children. I know she didn’t understand me in the beginning or, really, for quite a while.

But she loved me. It didn’t matter. Honestly, when your son marries a 23-year-old who knows a lot about Shakespeare but not about life, you can assume she won’t even understand herself for a good many years.

Kneeling by her bed and crying last week, I listened to her soft voice, almost inaudible from dehydration, tell me those things we seem to only tell when we know we have limited time to speak them. I heard, “You’re one of my girls. You’re my daughter.” And I will treasure those words for as long as I have my own breath.

She deserves her loved ones around her, fiercely protecting her this time, and she has them. Children and grandchildren, being the loving humans she taught them to be. I see her nearest granddaughter drop by regularly, her grandson sitting at her side whispering kind words. I watch my own daughters paint her toenails, hold her hands, and caress her hair.

I am undone by this.

It’s the hard work of 85 years to have family like that. There is a legacy that will remain a thing of beauty long after breaths are taken and heartbeats cease.

I’ve never walked with someone at the end of life. I’ve lost a lot of people. Both parents and two sisters. But they all were there one moment and gone the next. No preparation. No ability to say all the things that need to be said and hear all the things that need to be heard. No time to process all the feelings that come with this downhill walk, and no choice in whether you want to make it.

I do want to.

I had this discussion with my daughter recently about our two cats that passed. One quickly and with no warning, the other with a diagnosis a few months before. Which was worse, saying a sudden, unwanted goodbye, or dragging through the daily hurt of watching it happen and being helpless? We mourned out kitties—we loved them so, and two in quick succession was too much. We both knew we were talking about more than the cats. We both agreed warning was better.

Yet we don’t know how to take this slow walk down the hill, a quicker walk than we had hoped, really. We don’t know when to laugh, when to cry, and we’re figuring out that both are OK, and they happen when they happen. We hate the tug-of-war between our lives here, jobs that demand us, lives that need living, and our longing to be there, sharing every minute we can. We don’t how to dance that choreography, and we realize no one does.

And what of this man? He’s walked beside her for over sixty years. When I tell him he’s a good man and a great husband, he merely says, “Well, it was all in those vows.” Indeed it was, but I’ve seldom seen anyone live his promises so well. He knows that a man’s promise is where his character is determined. But I don’t think he’s thought that—he’s simply done it.

I know this is supposed to be a series on young peoples’ voices. But these words needed to be said. Maybe these words need to be said to young people, not by them. I know marriage isn’t so popular anymore. I know suspicion of institutions leave the next generation wondering if it’s worth the risk. Commitment is frightening, and there are no guarantees. If there’s anything we have taught the next generation, it’s that they should always demand guarantees. Never try anything that isn’t sure to succeed.

Silly us. Why? That was such a foolish lesson. These are the lessons we needed to teach. The lessons of time. Long-haul belief in the family you’ve created. Faith that others will cling to after you’re gone. Love regardless of comprehension. Commitment to people who change, hurt, and confuse you, because they’re your people, and we keep hold of our peoples’ hands. Even, especially, when they have no idea where they’re going.

I’m glad she knows well where’s she’s going.

Men who delicately wipe their spouse’s forehead and hold her hand and walk with her through the pain of loss. Because they promised to. 

If only we had taught you that, rather than “success.” Because that right there is what success looks like. Like my mom and dad.

The Wonder of Creating

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On a side street in Seattle, one of those streets filled with artsy shops and lined with glass sculptures that look like Willy Wonka has been there, in other words, a street made just for me, we watched artisans create miracles out of blobs of molten amber glass.

The Fascination of Creation

They shoved the golden blobs into the furnace on the end of poles, waited for just the right temperature, and pulled them out. Quickly, before the glass could cool, they pulled and trimmed and twisted it, until we could see four legs and a neck begin to form. A long nose appeared out of nowhere, then a mane and a tail, flowing wildly in the imagined wind. Finally, we saw the horse the artist intended from the beginning, though all we could see at first was a lump of glass.

Sometimes they broke a leg pulling it too far, or the mane didn’t flow the way they wanted it to, or it wouldn’t balance on those magnificent back two legs, pawing into the air. They would thrust it back into the flame, beginning again, intent on making that horse exactly as they had planned it.

We were fascinated. 

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Creation is fascinating. Creation out of nothing is miraculous. Creation with an intentional plan is . . . it’s an act of God.

At church, we’ve started working all the way through the Bible. The Creation story is familiar to us. Like Goodnight Moon, we could recite it with little effort. If not word for word, we know the idea, and we imagine there is little more to glean from it than what we know—God created everything. The Garden of Eden was awesome. The end.

There is so much more.

Look at some of the first few words.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1.3)

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“God said.” We never see God forming anything until humans. Always, God simply speaks, and whatever he wants to happen does.

I wish I had that power over, say, making dinner.

God’s word is enough to accomplish his intentions. This was true at creation. It was true when Jesus spoke to the Roman centurion about healing his servant. It’s equally true now. Nothing stands in the way of a God intent in creating blessing and beauty.

“The Spirit of God was moving over the waters.”

God moved. You know when you hear the words God’s Spirit moved, something is going to happen. This, too, is true today; it’s not a nice little fact of creation alone. When God moves, something is going to happen. Something big.

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“In the beginning.” 

These first three words of Scripture, according to Old Testament expert John Walton, have a rich meaning we don’t get from knowing the meaning of those three words individually. It’s a phrase used to talk about plays and orchestras and the reign of kings. It’s a prelude—the time leading up to the big deal that’s coming.

In this case, it leads to the reign of kings indeed—the kings God is planning to create as the crown to his work. All of creation leads up to this—it’s the soliloquy before the play starts, the overture before the curtain opens, the bridesmaids walking down the aisle before the music swells and the bride steps out.

Why Order?

We see God creating morning and evening, concepts of time he doesn’t require in eternity. He fashions sun and moon, the ebb and flow of tides, the barriers between sky and sea and land. He forms flowers and trees and hyenas and platypuses and walking sticks—all, it says, reproducing “according to its own kind.”

What does all this mean? It means God knows how to craft a blown glass horse. He doesn’t need time in his eternity—but we do. He doesn’t need wheat that reliably reproduces wheat, not marigolds,  and cows that systematically reproduce cows, not jackals. But we do. It doesn’t matter to him if the ocean overtakes the land, but it matters to us.

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God, like the craftspersons in Seattle, knew exactly what he wanted the end to look like, and he would not settle for less. He may have begun with a blob, but he always had in his mind what that blob would become.

What blows my mind is that what was in his mind was to create a universe perfectly suited to us. We were the finale he had in mind. We were the denouement of the play. We were the kings meant to begin our reign.

He was pulling and twisting and turning a chaotic, empty universe into a masterpiece—with giving it to us in mind.

The intentionality of the creation astounds me. The beneficiaries of it outright slay me. Yes, we could get proud at the notion that the creation is for us—and we could abuse it and use it selfishly and carelessly. We could think we must be something else if God put in so much effort to bless us.

Or we could fall on our faces in wonder and humble awe that he would do such a thing for beings who would never deserve that gift.

God still creates order out of the chaos of our universe. God still speaks; God still moves; and God still fashions order in our lives, if we choose it. Often, like Adam and Eve, we opt to be our own god, but this leads to a chaotic, formless existence, as it did before God gave us order.

Rich Mullins had a song called With the Wonder, and I wish I could quote it all for you here, but copyright. (Which I deeply respect, given I live off it.) He sings about a God who filled with world with sights and sounds and concludes—“you filled this world with wonders, and I’m filled with the wonder your world.”

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I’m filled with it, too. I’m filled with the wonder that its intentionality, its craftsmanship, came out from a master craftsman because he wanted to gift us with Swiss railroad-like precision, where every created thing has its purpose and plan. That we threw a spike in that perfect cog of order doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate it and work with him to re-create it.

Read Genesis 1 today. Marvel in its craft. Stand, or kneel, in awe of its intentionality. Then thank God for his wonder-filled gift.

Amen.