"Then I got good at my work. Then I found a way to love it. "
As someone who trained as a EE (microwave theory and techniques), and then proceeded to gain skills in magnetics, disk drives, static discharge, quality engineering, reliability engineering, flash memory technology, and more, I heartily commend this article. You don’t always get to choose what you do, and hence getting the attitude that you’re going to do it all as unto the Lord is really a big plus for you, even if you don’t put it in as many words on your resume.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
We ought to be passionate about the Gospel! As a former pastor (almost 17 years) I can say I would love to be a pastor. As life turned out (and no complaining from me!) God gave me a limitation (from a broker neck). I made the “career” change 20 years ago. Am I passionate about IT? I can say that IT is really interesting and I find programming (experience: mainframe COBOL and PL1 w some assembler; Webbased with Cold Fusion, HTML, Javascript and CSS) really really challenging and rewarding. Now I am basically a project manager. It’s less fun because I have to bug people to do their job and report project statuses to me. But it is a people job and I guess I do it well enough (I am rewarded well so shouldn’t complain).
How does Gospel passion translate to the secular workforce?
- Work itself is God honoring
- Providing for self, having enough to give faithfully to one’s church, and enough to save for the future is glorifying God (for the Christian).
- On top of that the workplace is a tremendously open mission field. It’s all there: pagans (I know a guy at work who has a metal rock band), liberals, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Hindus, and many more. Also young people just starting out (who call me “sir” and I tell them “call me Jim”), old people preparing for retirement, dying people who suddenly are hit by a car while away on business or crash the snowmobile. parents with kids who have committed suicide, et cetera et cetera. Also there: some complete jerks that remind me I need to quietly pray for them.
(Thinking about the above … I’m kind of going to miss it when I retire)
The take-away for me in this one was (a) helpfully countercultural because our culture says figure out what you love then pursue it, but for Christians it’s often the other way around: figure out your responsibilities and learn to love them. (b) It’s not just work/vocation that work this way. Whatever we get to know of “happiness” generally comes from learning to want what we have rather than managing to have what we want.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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