Faith and Work

I have had a lot of jobs in my life, from white collar to blue collar, from the exciting to the repetitive and the mundane. I wish I could say that I have always had a positive attitude about all my jobs, but the reality is that I have had jobs I hated, and have done work that left me feeling completely dehumanized. College students get their education anticipating entering the "real world" of a career and a job. Making that transition from school to the working world is important. Here are some things I have found to be helpful in making the transition successfully.

First, a Reformed perspective on work has been tremendously helpful for me. The Reformers, like John Calvin, eliminated the long held medieval distinction between sacred work and secular work. They elevated all vocations into a calling blessed by God. All work is significant because God himself engaged in the work of creation. Work also involves, for the Reformers, worship. That is, we worship God through obedience to him in our jobs; our attitude makes work meaningful. Work, furthermore, provides a context for our continual learning about God. Our job, if we let it, can cultivate godliness, moderation, perseverance, and self-control. Thus, any job has the potential to transform us.

Second, we have opportunities to integrate our faith and work so that we don't end up having a working world and another world outside of work where the two never meet. David Miller in his book God at Work offers four ways of bringing our faith and our jobs together: connecting biblical ethics to concrete applications in the marketplace; seeing the workplace as a mission field to reach the lost; finding meaning and purpose in work through a Christian worldview; and, using my job as a means of personal change through working with others in community and fellowship.

Yes, all work involves a certain amount of toil and difficulty. But seeing it as the possibility of sharing in the work that God wants to do on this earth can help us in those times when we feel like we are going nowhere. In a day when the level of satisfaction for so many in their jobs is low, we need to recover looking at our vocation from a more biblical point of view. If college students can gain this outlook now, it can the means of transforming society for the better.