"People go out to their work and to their labor until the evening” (Ps. 104:23).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it another way:
Indeed, for many of us a full hour to pray before our work starts would be a blessed luxury! This balance of our time has been the same for centuries. When the Benedictine order of monks was founded on the principle of "work and prayer", where work informed prayer and vice versa, without holding one of these to be more important than the other. But have we lost this perspective today? Do we instead consider them to be totally separate activities?"After the first morning hour [of prayer], the Christian’s day until evening belongs to work."
Many people put a very hard distinction between work and prayer saying "I can feel God close to me when I'm in church, but God can't really be interested in what I do all day, can he? It's only what I do to pay the bills." But the Creator of the universe delights in what we do, because our work reflect the image of God himself as we engage in creating and maintaining order and beauty in God's world.
So does God care whether the trains run on time, or if a whole community like Western Cornwall are cut off by rail because of a collapsed sea wall (as happened at Dawlish last year)? Does God care whether the law is upheld, justice is done, people are served, children are educated?
Yes, he does. The Bible clearly teaches "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it" so what exactly did you think was left out of that?
A whole host of Bible characters served God in different ways through the opportunities their work gave them: not just as priests or leaders, but as administrators (like Joseph), civil servants (like Daniel and his friends), business men and women like Lydia, parents, doctors (like Luke), farmers, builders (like Jesus himself) and many more.
So our work is legitimately a topic for prayer, not just in the crises but also in seeking to shape the world and our little corners of it to reflect more and more of God's ways. And let's not pretend all this is easy - there is much we would want to challenge about the way we do business, engineering or providing for the most vulnerable. To be an engaged worker doesn't mean buying into it all wholesale, but it does mean celebrating and enhancing the good and identifying and influencing the bad.
And we should also avoid the tendency to split people off into tribes (children and students, working, parents, retired, ill etc). Whoever you are, the overwhelming majority (98%) of Christians spend 95% of their week outside a church building or associated activities, so the place where you can make most difference is where you spend the most of your time, be it in school, paid work, caring for an elderly relative, bringing up children or volunteering. (LICC research)
Have you seen the blind spot we have here? I am no less married at 10am on a Monday sitting at my desk than I am when I'm in my husband's company at home. But people often don't feel part of the people of God when they are at work: the church is only recognized as such when gathered on a Sunday, not when out serving God in the world every other day of the week.
Churches frequently don't even know basic information about where and how their members are serving God, the challenges they face or how they can support each other in prayer or practical help/coaching/contacts. For example, my church in Acomb views the local area as its main mission field, and we rarely pray for Harrogate, though at least 3 of us work there including me (working in engineering, teaching and hospital management).
It's time for that to change. We are the people of God all day, every day and we need to get better at supporting each other in our diverse modes of service, so we can sing together:
"Let the favour of the Lord our God be upon us,and prosper for us the work of our hands․ O prosper the work of our hands!" Psalm 90:17
The next Lent reflection is available here...
See also:- The Great Divide: how Christians can overcome the sacred-secular divide
- Holiness in Action: The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth
- Holiness in Action: For the Love of God
No comments:
Post a Comment