My friend and colleague Ricky sent me this post that wrestles with whether God cares for all those prayer requests we make about our work. Every Wednesday we have a mandatory prayer meeting (10 mins of prayer and 1 hour of meetings) to "pray" for issues in our lives. Most of our requests revolve around work and how stressed we are. Ricky and I always look at each other and wonder whether something is amiss in our lives when we seem so run down over the stuff we have to do.
http://www.thehighcalling.org/work/does-god-really-care-about-important-meeting
The post makes me think about our theology of work. We know that work is good and edifying. It is God-ordained and specific to who we are and who we were created to be. Yet we have come to idolize it and prize it so beyond what it ought to be, often sacrificing our family, our health, and our sanity to please our boss. And sometimes, our boss isn't the man who sits in the big office downstairs, it's an invisible one inside of us who insists that we toil for futile things like fame, prestige, and success. We give ourselves over to task-masters and willingly enslave ourselves to our work because it gives to us our sense of meaning and identity. In a way, as the article mentions, it has become our idol.
Today is Wednesday and we will have our prayer meeting again. I wonder how to balance this idea of work (in the holy and godly sense) and this god it has become.
No comments:
Post a Comment