The Real Art Of Vocation
Wendell Berry’s Poem, The Real Work, begins this way…
It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
A phrase that those of us who like to be in control find haunting. And in a community that values production, confusing. But hidden in these words is a significant biblical truth that helps us understand how we ought to understand our real work. God, like a master painter, is the designer of real work.
In the creation account, on the 6th day, God designed “real” work for all made in His Image.
Genesis 1:26 - “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 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.”
God designed real work to have purpose and meaning, dignity and value and is for the sake of the world.
Yet our work does not feel like this. It feels as though it is broken, demanding, belittling, identity creating or identity stealing, and life draining. A necessary evil that we must do so our family and we may eat. And in those moments where we feel the brokenness and dead-end ness of our work, We no longer know what to do. Except to log on to Indeed.com, call a babysitter for relief for the day or accept the stoic view that “we will never do real work
.”
Paul in Ephesians 6 understands something about coming to the point of not knowing what to do about our work as he writes to the church in Ephesus. He writes to help them see how followers of Christ ought to work in a world with a different understanding of work: We are to work as if we are serving the Lord.
When we do not know what to do, our real work begins as we embrace God’s design for real work. That is doing all the work we are assigned, whether changing a diaper, reviewing marketing plans, washing windows, coding a new user portal, or sitting in the carpool line. All our work can be real work when we come to the moment of understanding that it is not what we do that defines real work. But how Christ's work helps us understand the place and importance of our work, and how do we do it?
