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An online magazine asked readers to summarize their life in six words. Many of them described the frustration of work.
· “The psychic said I'd be richer.”
· “Love drama, just not my own.”
· “Not quite what I was planning.”
· “Never lived up to my potential.”
· “Thought I would have more impact.”
If you read my article, What You Believe About Your Work Is Making You Miserable, you might have thought I was naively optimistic about the potential of work. The truth is that it’s not just what you believe about your work that’s making you miserable. It’s often the work itself that makes you miserable. For some, it’s the long hours and physical demands of work. For others, it’s the emotional toll that stress takes on them. For many people, it’s the people. Or at least, some of the people. Office politics and difficult colleagues can make work feel unbearable. But the frustration we experience in our jobs is trying to tell us something.
1. The frustration in your job keeps you from making a religion out of your work
As the quotes I shared illustrate, many people are surprised by the challenges they face at work. Hearing the success stories, we often assume limitless potential for ourselves. Most people either hit a wall or make a detour and are disappointed by where they end up. Some people achieve all their dreams only to realize that their dreams weren’t all that they hoped they would be.
According to the Bible, this disappointment we experience with work is a result of the curse God brought on the earth as a result of human sin (Genesis 3:17). It’s expressed in the account of Adam and Eve by the “thorns and thistles” (Genesis 3:18) that made cultivating the garden hard for them. Today, we still experience those thorns in the form of computer viruses and office gossip.
The thorns have a good purpose, though, even though they’re painful. They keep us from making a religion out of our work. They confront us with the reality that we’re not in paradise anymore. They remind us that we wrecked what we had by cutting God out of the picture. The thorns force us to ask why things are the way that they are and invite us to consider the Bible’s diagnosis that turning our backs on God comes with consequences. They also point us to hope, though.
2. The frustration in your job shows you the way to make the most of your work
When we follow the thorns back to the garden, we see the mess that turning away from God brought to our world. But the diagnosis points to the cure. If turning away from God made our work miserable, turning back to Him helps us make the most of it. The writer of Ecclesiastes puts it like this:
“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? Ecclesiastes 2:24-25
God is the one who helps us to find enjoyment in our jobs. That doesn’t mean that He takes away all the thorns, but He uses them to teach us to depend on Him for peace, contentment, and strength. He helps us make the most of even the thorniest of jobs when we draw near to Him and seek the help that He alone can give.
3. The frustration in your job points to the one who can solve it
Maybe you think that a God who curses work because we turn our backs on Him is cruel and uncaring. The Bible tells a much different story. Not only does God help us make the most of our work when we include Him in it, but He faced what we face in order to provide an ultimate solution. Compare the frustrations you have at work with the ones that Jesus faced in His calling. He suffered from poverty and poor work conditions when He came into the world. He was insulted by “customers” and threatened by “competitors.” Just as His “career” seemed to be getting started, it was ended by people who were jealous of His “success.” When people mocked Him by putting a crown of thorns on Him, Jesus stood with all who have ever felt the thorns of their own jobs and wondered whether there’s a God who cares.
The message of the Bible is that through His death on the cross, Jesus bore the curse of sin. All who put their trust in Him, are invited to paradise and an eternity free of thorns.
It was my experience of the thorns of work that created a disillusionment that eventually drew me to the Bible and the message of Jesus. If you’ve had a similar experience, share it in the comments.
If this is new to you and you think it’s something you’d like to explore, I’ve written a free, 12-week course called The Unstuck Life that walks you through the essentials of Jesus’ teachings in daily, bite-sized messages that you can read or watch by video. To learn more, go to www.gracebc.ca/getunstuck.
In awe of Him,
Paul
