Way to Live: Work
by Nancy Pineda-Madrid with Angela Fernandez (age 15)
The very first story in the Bible describes the creation of the universe as "the work that God did." And throughout the story of God's care for our world, we hear God's activity described as "work" again and again. God feeds the animals (Psalm 104) and gathers people together like a flock of chickens (2 Esdras 1:30; Luke 13:34). God is a potter who makes human beings, a physician who heals, a judge who pronounces sentences, a mother who nurses a child. We human beings do jobs like these: raising livestock, manufacturing useful objects, and providing assistance through health care, legal advice, or child care. When we do that work, we are taking part in a process of creativity and care that started with God and that is still in God's keeping.
Work is an important part of a way to live in relation to the loving, challenging life of God. Good work feeds us spiritually as well as physically, while at the same time making the world a little more just, a little more peaceful, and a little more hospitable for others. But sometimes you look for work and you only get a job.
Finding a passion for work
The writer and minister Frederick Buechner once said that a person's vocation can be found in the place where his or her deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger. This is the place where we may find the work God is calling us to do—the work that will both satisfy us and benefit others. Finding this place is not always easy, however. You need to pay attention to yourself. Where is your deep gladness? You also need to pay attention to what is outside of yourself by coming face-to-face with the world's deep hunger—for food, for healing, for beauty, for understanding, for shelter, and for so much else.
Achieving this kind of attention is difficult when you are surrounded by voices telling you what you should want to do. Too often these voices tell you to focus on money and status, even if it means neglecting the wisdom of Buechner's advice. One of these voices might even be your own. I nearly lost sight of my own deep gladness during a search for new work a few years ago. I was trying to decide among several possibilities when a friend gave me some important advice. "As you make your decision about which job to take," she said, "it's natural to think about what you'd be good at. But it is even more important to think about what you really long to do." That advice made a huge difference in my thinking. Because I got in touch with my "deep gladness," I was able to risk taking the work I really wanted, not simply the job I already knew how to do. That work proved to be the right choice for me.
Not long ago I asked Raynie, a sophomore at a San Francisco high school, if she knew anyone who had a clear and intense sense of having found the right work. She told me about her dad. Ten years ago he had a job as a lawyer in a big downtown firm. The firm offered to make him a partner, which got him thinking about what he really wanted to do with his life. He decided to leave the firm, and now he directs an organization that develops the leadership skills of middle- and lower-income folks so they can fight for what they need.
Raynie says she has learned a lot from her father about the meaning of work. "My dad works hard; he comes home tired most nights. But it's pretty amazing when I go to meetings with him. The people talk about how to create more affordable housing, how to provide health care for low-income folks, how to improve schools. They have made a big difference in terms of the quality of life in the city. And besides, my dad loves his work."
Sometimes stopping to listen closely to the world's deep hunger is hard. Raynie's dad was moved by the cries of community groups in his city for better neighborhood services. When he stopped to think about what he wanted to do with his life, he realized that these groups had been speaking to him about one piece of the world's deep hunger for justice. What need cries out to you? The cry may not come from "the world" as a whole but from one person who asks you to use your gifts in a way you may not have thought about yet. Do your friends often ask you to explain math problems? Are you someone to whom they turn for advice about relationships? Do little kids especially like being with you? These questions express hungers these people are asking you to fill; do you find deep gladness when you respond to one of them? If you are one who especially notices pollution and wants to do something about that, the earth itself may be crying out to you as if hungry for your care. Often others help us get in touch with the place where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. They can help us see more in ourselves than we are able to see on our own. Other people can help us see the depth of our passions and also how we are called to respond to the world's urgent needs.
The Gospel of Mark tells about a foreigner, a Syrophoenician woman, who helped Jesus to understand his mission more fully. In the midst of his ministry in Galilee, Jesus decided to rest for a while—a difficult thing to do because many people wanted to hear his teaching and experience his healing. One woman, a Greek born in Syrophoenicia, sought him out and begged him to heal her daughter, who was very ill. Jesus answered, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." He declined to help her because his ministry, as he then understood it, was to the Jews alone. But this tenacious woman would not take no for an answer. "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Because this foreigner had a need to see her daughter cured, she challenged Jesus' understanding of his ministry. He listened to her, recognized the truth in her claim, and changed his answer. "For saying that, you may go," he told her. "The demon has left your daughter." The Syrophoenician woman returned to find her daughter healed. And Jesus left this encounter seeing his own life’s work stretched beyond the boundaries of the Jewish People (Mark 7:24-30).
As we seek to hear where the world’s deep hunger is crying out to us and how it might affect the work we do, we need to be open, as Jesus was, to the voices of people in need.
From Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Don C. Richter, copyright © 2002 by Upper Room Books. Used by permission of the publisher, 1-800-972-0433, http://www.bookstore.upperroom.org. Explore the website www.waytolive.org.
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