How's that working for you? Finding Joy in Work | Nathan Lawson

Well, I hope you are having an excellent week. It has been a week of firsts for my family.

Well, first, we did launch our Rooted initiative on Wednesday night.

Hundreds of people in here, new groups, existing groups. But the one thing they

have in common is all of them have people in them that their own hearts are

beginning to say, maybe God is calling me to take my next step of faith.

We do have a new sermon series that starts next week that will sort of parallel

what's going on in Rooted.

But even if you're not able to do that because of work or just other things

you've got going on in your life, we've got a, it's going to be an excellent

series where we walk through the gospel of John and wrestle with that story.

Like what should the gospel story look like as my story becomes a part of his story?

Well, like we say, there was, for my family, my kids started a new week of school

recently. And let me tell you, there is nothing as exciting as a first day of school.

Perhaps you remember that, right? The new backpack, the fresh stationery,

the clothes are laid out like it's the one time you only have to give a wake

up call once and like, boom, they're out of the bed like they're ready for it.

They want to meet the class. It's full of excitement on the first day.

But you all know that it might not be the second day and it might not be the third.

But at some point in the near future, it is going to lose some of its luster. Right.

By day hundred, it will feel more like the wandering in the wilderness than

it does like that first exit from Egypt.

How long, oh Lord, must your people suffer?

And maybe for you, when you started that career, you started a new job and it

was exciting and you get to use your degree and you're going to be in your own

classroom. You're starting your own business.

And it may not be the first day or the fifth day, but I don't know if it'll be day 100 or day 300.

But at some point, it starts to lose some of its shine.

That despite the promise of my first guidance counselor, Mr.

Murphy, trying to direct us toward a career, and let me help guide you toward

a career that will make your life happy and fulfilled, and he tells me,

well, you see, the secret is, according to Confucius, right,

just choose something you love, and you'll never have to go to work a day in your life.

Right. That is a lie on two counts.

First off, you know, Confucius didn't say that, and there's a reason he didn't

say that. That is full of it. That's why I didn't say that. That's complete nonsense.

That would be like saying, if you really love your wife, you'll never have to

work on your marriage ever.

Right. Let's see how that goes. Right. If you really love your kids,

it'll never be challenging.

Work is tough. And I like that the Bible doesn't sound like an inspirational

poster of like, you know, it's going to be great. It owns it honestly.

In fact, we're going to be looking at Ecclesiastes where it kind of just wrestles

with the fact that there's a lot about work that is hard, that is monotonous,

that can feel like we're stuck running in circles.

And it's going to look at it square in the face and say, not hiding things,

not trying to like placate it or, put a shine on it. We're not just trying to

look for that silver lining.

How do we make work something that brings joy?

So we'll be looking at Ecclesiastes, which does start with that tone of honesty.

It says, meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. Everything,

utterly meaningless, it says.

And that's the kind of thing you could just put on that morning cup of coffee

to really get you started on Monday, get you going.

Now, there's going to be a couple caveats here, though, just to give you a little

linguistic difficulty.

This word is very tough to translate.

And our word meaningless, if you by that you mean pointless,

is not quite the right term.

The word meaningless here would mean non-impactful, inconsequential, it doesn't last.

The word in the background is hevel in Hebrew, and it's the same word due to

a series of issues with Latin and that H sound in Greek, where we get the word Abel.

Abel is the same as this word right here. His name Abel in Genesis,

you remember Cain and Abel.

And the one thing you'll know about Abel is he is not in the Bible very long.

He sort of shows up and then he's dead. And like, that's the end of his story is real short.

And when you're looking at this word, it means vapor or smoke.

Like it's here and then like breathing out on a cold day when you go and you can see it.

It's It's not fictional, it doesn't not exist, it just doesn't last, right?

It says you can't grab it, you can't make it last longer by putting your hands

around it, like the smoke is here and then it is gone.

And what he's going to describe in this first chapter is how a lot of the way

that really that we think about work is a lot like that.

That you work on something for years and years and then you are replaced by somebody else.

And you're remembered for minutes, hours, weeks, if you're lucky,

put a brass plaque on it and stretch it into 20 years.

But pretty soon it's gone.

And the question he's going to ask is this. when we say everything is meaningless,

he is not opening his essay like a good eighth grade English teacher advises.

He's telling you not his conclusion up front.

He's just stating the reality that we all agree on.

That as Billy Graham said, that the one most surprising thing about life is its brevity.

And if you ask anybody near the end of their career, what's shocking about it?

And they're like, that it was so short. That's what's shocking about it.

It was like here and then it's gone.

And so it's saying up front, look, everything is short. It's over before you even get started.

So how can it have any value at all?

What do people gain, he says, from all their labors? Like, what's the point of work?

All their toil under the sun. What a good word to describe work, toil.

We're gonna be asking this question. Why does work feel so heavy?

Why, especially at this time in our culture, Do people seem to struggle maybe

more than even in generations past where the majority of people worked in singular

careers for the majority of their life?

And that is no longer the case. The average people will switch careers in seven years.

Statistically, you are less likely to be happy and satisfied with your work

now than you would have been 20 years ago.

And you're less likely to feel like the path that you're on is the one that

you would like to be on for a career than ever before. or work has always been

heavy from the beginning, for a long time since Solomon wrote this,

but it's almost like it's gotten more difficult.

To describe work, there's a great poem by Louis Sakaar from the book Holes,

which is a great fiction book if you've not read a book and you're looking for

a good audio book or a book to do as a family.

But the poem says, if only, if only, the woodpecker cries.

The bark of the tree were as soft as the sky.

And what makes that image great is he's using the image of a woodpecker wishing

that I wish my job wasn't this bad.

Think about the job of a woodpecker as a metaphor for work. You're just going

to pound your head repeatedly into the hardest thing you can to get enough food to survive.

Eventually, you'll make a home out of it, and then you're dead.

Like, that's work in his mind. You're just going to smash your head repeatedly.

And so when you're at work on Monday and you think, this feels a lot like a woodpecker.

That's what this feels like. I feel like I'm smashing my own head in the wall over and over again.

He says, yeah, that's what work can feel like.

Or if you've not read Holes recently, This wisdom is not unique to the modern generation.

There was a famous Dread Pirate Roberts who said, Life is pain,

your highness, and anyone who says different is selling something.

And if Solomon said it, and if Wesley said it, and if the poems say it,

we cannot imagine that our situation is utterly unique.

But at the same time, it does seem harder. It does seem like what people want

from their job, its purpose and its identity, to feel validated, like my life has a point.

It's almost like we're putting more on work than a past generation.

And it's that expectation that is perhaps going to potentially sabotage our

ability to find satisfaction.

I had the opportunity very near the end of summer to go to water country.

We were not members, so this was a one-time trip.

When you're in a family of a million people, such as myself,

it sort of limits how many things you're going to go to that have a per person admission price.

And so we go to water country and I'm pumped because I've heard about it and

the water slides and it's hot, you know, like it's sort of hot if you're new

to the peninsula from sort of like April 1st until forever.

It's just, you're just dying in the humidity and you're going to cool down.

And so I go to the water park and I'm going to ride this huge water slide.

Colossal right at the beginning.

And you go. You stand in line.

10 minutes and 20, 30, 40, 55 minutes, two minutes of back in line.

Next ride. 10, 20. And I'll just say, I mean, I'm going to own this up front.

I may not have been handling that as well as a father should.

I'm not saying I was unpleasant, but there was an edge to my joy.

Stop asking if I'm happy. I am happy. Stop asking.

And the thing about it is, is if you ask me in the moment, like, why are you upset?

The lines. That's why I'm upset. I mean, the lines, that's the problem.

The lines in this place, you can barely even, right, the lines causing the problem.

But the thing about it is, is I sort of knew that lines were a reality of water country.

The real problem wasn't the lines, right? It was my expectations going into

it, that I sort of showed up with a fantasy world about what water country was

going to be, that was based on complete fiction.

And when that fantasy collided with reality, now I find myself frustrated.

I was expecting VIP treatment on a general admission ticket.

And the question is, are the lines to blame, or is it not the case that most

of our frustrations are caused, right?

Not by the reality itself, but because our reality, when our expectations collide with reality.

And for a lot of us, when it comes to our careers and what they're supposed

to be doing for us to give us purpose, energy, and drive, and meaning,

it is like that Jansport backpack well before they invented Chromebooks.

And oh, that generation does not realize that we invented rucking way before it was a thing.

We felt the weight of education, massive textbooks, a year worth of curriculum

in all subjects. They'll carry on their back like a turtle library.

You were to carry it with you and your backpack would not survive from one year to the next.

I never had a backpack make it to the second year because it was loaded to capacity.

And it does seem like in modern times that people have put a lot more on work.

As society itself has lost some of its sense of transcendence and purpose,

what made things seem valuable and worth it, it seems like work was supposed

to make up the difference. Change the world. Do something meaningful.

This will validate you. And it just seems to matter that when you're at an event

with other people and you ask their name, and then you ask, yes, but what do you do?

We're not just stating your skill set. We want to know what kind of person are

you. And that weight starts to get terribly heavy.

And there's a lot of reactions to it. because it doesn't take very long in very

many careers to understand that that return on investment of meaning,

purpose, and joy rarely lasts past the first few months.

And some people start to recognize that it just feels like the game is rigged.

Tim Minchin was a graduate of the University of Australia, and he recently gave

a graduation speech, nine lessons of life. And he opens with this little gem

that represents the frustration of that next generation. He said, fine.

If you have a dream or whatever, something in your heart that you wanted to

do your whole life, well, then I guess go for it.

After all, it's something to do with your time chasing a dream.

And if it's big enough, it'll take you most of your life to achieve it.

So by the time you get to the end and get to it and staring in the abyss of

the meaninglessness of your own achievement, you're almost dead.

So it won't matter anyway.

Man, from Ecclesiastes to Tim mentioned, we're really hitting all those points this morning.

And the thing about it is, it's just recognizing that more and more people are

frustrated with the job that they're in, that some have given up hope that maybe

work isn't what all it was cracked up to be.

I want to again emphasize that Ecclesiastes gives an honest look at work.

It doesn't just spiritualize it and say with a prayer in the morning,

it will make it all work. It's the kind of book that would say things like this, right?

A feast is made for laughter and wine makes life merry, but money is really

the answer for everything.

Uncle, is that even in the Bible? It's what it's saying is if you want to be

happy like tonight, a party is your best bet.

But if you want to be really happy, money. That's what you need. Signed Solomon.

It's just recognizing, and there's just some truth to that. This isn't trying

to hide from reality. Money makes life more comfortable than not having it.

See, Ecclesiastes is not against work and accumulation. It is against illusion

and delusion that causes us to be frustrated by trying to make work accomplish

what it could never accomplish because that's not what it was designed to do.

And it seems like when you put pressure on a system improperly,

it is going to break in predictable places.

And in fact, there are two of those areas that we want to look at this morning.

There are two enemies to finding joy in work that Solomon will highlight amongst

others, but two that I see so commonly in both Solomon's time and our own that

they continue to be exposed by the broken ways our culture talks about work.

And the first enemy of finding joy in work is when your ambition is tied with sideway glances.

Yes, the enemy of envy. Because Solomon noted all the way back then that I saw

this, that one of the things that people use to make toil worth it is that all

achievement springs from a person's envy of one another.

This too is meaningless, insubstantial. It's like trying to chase the wind.

It is playing an unwinnable game.

The first enemy of finding joy in your work is envy.

Envy is a corruption of the natural thing that God gave you to be ambitious

and to pursue excellence.

That God designed us that when we're doing something, we want to do it well.

When you're playing the piano, you want to play it better in the future than

you were playing it now. You have a natural tendency to want to play better.

But in a lack of other gauges of value, it starts to become the case that our

work takes on meeting, not just for our own pursuit of excellence and creation.

That reflection of Adam, when God looked at Adam and said, you know,

work the garden, make a place that cultivates life.

Instead, we start looking at other gardens to determine if our garden is better than their gardens.

I mean, that's just the case that a lot of anxiety about work is not driven

by the work itself, but by the feeling I have about how everyone else is doing.

You wouldn't know whether or not to be upset about not owning a home if you

weren't looking at your peers whose parents helped them buy one.

It wouldn't bother you as much, but it does. Not because of its own sake,

necessarily, but often because of the comparison that comes with it.

That your kids are doing just fine until you see them performing sports alongside

someone else's kids and suddenly there's a little bit of a different feeling that comes up.

And that kind of ambition, what Solomon wants to rule is, is like chasing after the wind.

It is like playing a game that is guaranteed to end in one location,

in hardship and disappointment.

The idea that you're going to chase something down to outdo others,

to outperform, to be smarter, to be better, to finally prove that other people

are wrong, to prove to your parents that you could make it in this career after all. Ha!

But of course, they're almost passed away and indifferent by the time you do it.

It's a hard thing when what gave something value is a comparison standard that rarely lasts.

We move cities, our friendship groups change, the people we compare ourselves

onto online shift all the time, and it slowly loses its luster.

And if that's what drives us, how many companies are started by individuals

who have a rough relationship with a parent or sibling and are driven to get

at the office at four in the morning and stay till 10 to prove that I'm worth it,

and they work and they work and it doesn't seem to ever resolve and I've proved enough.

That's something that work was never designed to do to give you meaning and

validation. If that were the case, then we would be grading kids based on their

true value on every spelling test result.

And we, of course, would be appalled at such a thought, even as we in our own

minds use it as a rubric for one another.

It is a broken corruption of ambition when it gets tainted with envy,

that it's possible to pursue excellence without comparison before its own sake.

But there is another one that you see amongst younger people,

the next single verse in this. Here it is right here.

It says in verse five, this is the next verse. You see, there's many in our

culture that have looked at what the old culture did, wearing themselves out for what?

I'm like, why did I do that? I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

I'm going to quit this game before I start.

I'm not going to wear myself out. What's the minimum I can do to make the rent?

How hard do I really have to work in order to maximize my leisuring opportunities?

And here's the way Solomon describes that. There are some, he says,

who are just driven by envy of a neighbor, but there are others,

fools who fold their hands and ruin themselves.

The next verse will say it is better for one handful than two handfuls with

toil, one handful with tranquility, he's going to describe.

This fools who fold their hands and bring upon ruin.

Because if there is a temptation to bring about a corruption of work through

the use of envy and leading into ease, okay, I'm forcing the alliteration here,

but you're just going to have to go with it.

Ease is also a corruption. I am just

trying to do the lowest level of work possible, and I'll call it peace.

It is a corruption of peace. It is a desire to live without drive,

to do what's expected of me and no more than that.

And the thing about this is this likewise, just like ambition always ends with

that sense of emptiness that comes because comparison does not take us where God wants us.

And ultimately, usually the people we're comparing to are not even there when it's over.

The bad relationship with the father doesn't exist by the time we retire from

our career and prove it right.

But at the same time, the ease also leads in a predictable pattern.

That the problem with ease is that your natural hardwiring is to do excellent

work. And when you don't, the result is starting to feel increasingly tired.

Haven't you noticed if you wake up on a Saturday with nothing to do and you

sleep in and you kind of walk downstairs and you do a little bit of work and how do you feel?

Tired. Like you see kids just sitting on a couch and they've been like watching TV for a while.

You take your dishes to the kitchen

and they're like all the way to the kitchen. Oh, sounds exhausting.

I mean, they're just worn out. Like, oh, I just can't. and you're like,

biologically, this doesn't make any sense.

You have eaten enough carbohydrates to power a city and you sat here all morning and like, what?

Well, how are you possibly? Yeah, I just feel tired. What's wrong?

I feel tired. You want to go outside?

You want to go ride your bike? Oh gosh. I mean, that's like not Lance Armstrong.

All right. It's exhausting.

And here's the thing. The same kids, you've had that scenario where they're just exhausted.

The doorbell ring and a friend comes over and says, hey, we're going to go see a movie.

And without caffeine, there is no epinephrine drip.

Boom, life from non-life. Like they leap off the couch and it's like, oh yeah, I'm ready to go.

Like I'm grabbing my backpack. I'm good. You couldn't carry dishes 10 minutes

ago. Like what in the world just happened?

I can tell you this. You will always feel tired if you don't know what you're supposed to do next.

Your body will just start to feel tired if you say to yourself,

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing next. You will feel tired.

If you schedule your Saturday to do something, you will wake up and feel more energetic.

A human being simply was not designed to have nothing to do.

And the less we do, the more tired we feel.

I mean, how many young people have I met who are pursuing counselors and they're

just, they're saying, I just don't have energy to do anything.

I just don't have any energy. I just don't have any energy.

There's whole aisles in the grocery store selling energy drinks that are right

on the border of whether or not they're going to kill us.

Like they're right on that edge. And people said, I'll take that gamble because I just feel so tired.

And they go to a council thinking, if I just had more energy,

I would be doing meaningful things.

When the reality is, and you know this is the case, I've taken kids on mission

trips and places when they start working.

And there is no difference in the athletic ability on what happens when you

start working is that everybody realizes they had more energy than they thought.

Because it was clear what they were supposed to do.

That most of you had a certain level of energy and then you had kids or got

married and suddenly you're obligated to do something and you're suddenly accomplishing

things that your 23-year-old self didn't even believe possible.

Like you're doing a full-time job and car runs and medical advising and relearning

homework that you probably never learned properly in the first place.

And it's possible because you are actually capable of far more than you realize

when you have a purpose beyond yourself.

This is what you were made for. The problem with ease is that it promises comfort,

but it comes with an incredible destruction of our own nature,

which was made to create and to live life and to find joy.

And when we live into leisure, we just find life increasingly unenjoyable and

not the energy and the drive because work is not a curse. Work is what you were made to do.

And so we read, we hear those words when Viktor Frankl wrote in Man's Search

for Meaning that life is never made unbearable by circumstances alone,

but by a lack of meaning and purpose.

So these two enemies, these two enemies that have the potential,

and I see both one generation being driven to outdo, outperform,

look around and say, well, at least I'm doing something about it.

And another that is sitting back saying, listen, you want to wear yourself out,

knock yourself out. I'll get it in the will either way.

But both are missing out on the way that God designed us to find joy from work.

Because what Solomon tells us is this, is that here's his prayer when he gets

in chapter three, and he's starting to round a circle where he talks about how

seasons of life don't last as long as we should.

But he's going to say this, look, my prayer is that each of them may eat and

drink and find satisfaction in all of their toil, because this is a gift from God. What a phrase.

Even as he has acknowledged and looked square in the face with honesty at the

difficulty and the monotonousness of life.

To quote one author, every work has in it, no matter what we're doing,

a capacity, an aspect of it, which is like digging a ditch that just has to be done.

But even so, he said, the concept of work, Solomon says, is to work and find

satisfaction in it if you recognize that the very capacity to do it is a gift.

You see, work is something that we need to get meaning from.

Sorry, work is not something that we can get meaning from, we need to bring

our meaning to work. Work isn't going to supply it.

That if you're an anxious person that is worried that they're not being respected,

then no career change is going to bring it about.

That it is something we have to show up with and decide up front,

this is meaningful because I already have decided who I am and I don't need my work to validate it.

I know a number of people who have gone into teaching. No one makes it if you're

hoping that the kids are going to give you validation and respect as your source of meaning.

You kind of have to decide that you're worthy of respect before they utter a

word on it because they are children and you are supposed to lead them,

not the other way around.

But it really would be true in any career.

Military service, those who have decided up front that what I do has value and

meaning. And so the meeting that I have to sit through that is one more PowerPoint

presentation of bureaucracy, it's okay because I understand what I'm doing here.

I get my meaning. I get my meaning. I brought my meaning with me to work.

I'm not going to get it from my work.

One of my first significant jobs in college was scrubbing pots and pans at St.

John's Hospital and delivering food there. And I worked in this job in the hospital,

and there's a lot about it that was frustrating.

It's gross. It doesn't smell good. There's a lot of cleaning chemicals around

it. Pots and pans are not enjoyable.

But what makes it enjoyable is I was saving money for a wedding ring.

And there is just something about going in a particular direction for a particular

reason that meant I was having a good time while I worked there,

regardless, not because of what I was doing, but because I knew what what I was doing was for.

And so I bought our first ring. I bought our first mattress with that money

from that job before we got a ministry together.

The job had value and joy, not because scrubbing pots and pans is a particularly

interesting work, but because I went home every day knowing why I went in the first place.

Decide up front why it is you work. It puts it this way. This is a great metaphor.

Sow your seed in the morning. At the evening, let your hands not be idle,

for you do not know whether this will succeed or that, or whether both will do equally well.

One of the reasons that you just do work as you come in contact with it,

you do a job with excellence because you don't really know which one is going

to lead to a place of excellence.

I'm only going to do that if it's worth it. Well, good luck,

prophet, on picking that one out.

You don't know the day that you're going to show up. You don't know the meeting

that you're going to be in. It's cumulative. You don't even know.

It says you decided before I started, I don't even know which of these seeds are still good.

All I know is I was designed to plant seeds. And so I will keep planting,

knowing that God will bless some.

And from there we'll get direction and life. So wake up in the morning and you keep planting seeds.

You don't wait for the perfect job, the perfect opportunity,

the perfect workmates, the perfect boss.

You're just going to wait. I'm not planting seeds until everything's lined up.

Such people do not collect a harvest. You start sowing seeds in the morning,

before the rains come, before things are all right.

We decided up front, I'm the kind of person that God put to make a difference

in the world, and so I go out and start sowing.

The last thing we'll look at is this final aspect, which is to find joy in the

work, doing the work, and not just the outcomes.

And the outcomes are good. Getting paid is nice. Knowing that you're making a difference is good.

But if that's the only thing motivating, I'm going to tell you that there'll be days of frustration.

Martin Luther King, who I share a birthday with, this has been a great blessing

in my entire school career because I was always granted a day off on my birthday,

plus civil rights stuff, that's good too.

But he described work with these two insightful comments that are helpful as

you're considering finding joy in the gift, the capacity to do work.

He says, your work should have length and breadth. And I just love this image when I heard it.

He said, described length, he said, it should be something that you could measure

in years that you're getting better, that it's possible to get better at what you're doing over time.

That you should be, because you were designed by God to be able to do that,

that you should, if you're saying, well, is this really good?

My career I'm in. Well, let me ask you this. Is it possible to get better at

doing what you're doing over time?

Are you teaching better this year than you did last year? Are you leading better

this year than you did last year?

Does your work have length to it?

And then he describes breadth as impact.

Is your work impacting as many people for the good as it could?

Is it possible that if you continue to pursue your job with excellence,

would it make a difference in the lives of more people.

These are two barometers to use to consider whether or not you are in a line

of work that was designed for you.

Doing work with joy can be difficult because it's the jobs we are given,

the things that they pay people money for are often things that were unpleasant.

If it's really pleasant, you have to pay them to do it. They call that a cruise.

That's the other direction.

It implies it's unpleasant. That's why Solomon uses the word toil over and over and over again.

But what if we thought of it as a gift?

What if the work itself was described as something in your life that you said,

well, because God has given me the capacity to do it, the hands and the mind

that can do it, what if I changed the way I framed it up and decided that the

class that I'm in is an opportunity and not just a curse?

This is famously put forth in Mark Twain's book of Tom Sawyer,

where Tom Sawyer is assigned to whitewash a hundred yards of fence,

which he describes as the only barrier between him and enjoying a hot summer day of swimming.

And he can hear kids going out and going swimming and there

is this fence he's assigned by his aunt polly to

do it he's got the bucket of paint and grumbling while

sitting on the side of the road crying out like lamentations how long oh lord

it's unfair and unjust child labor wait they haven't invented that yet like

oh like he's just sitting there just moaning his lot in life to have things

so rub a hundred yards of fence you know how long that is like it's huge like

honey it's unreasonable,

And when his friend Ben Rogers comes by and is giving him a hard time,

Tom gets a stroke of genius.

And immediately, just to trick Ben, he picks up the bucket of paint and starts

going Leonardo da Vinci on this fence. I mean, he's smiling.

He's like painting with strokes, taking a step back, admiring his work and going

and doing it a little careful. And this, of course, throws Ben off.

Well, Tom, what are you doing? Ben Rogers clears. And Tom says, I don't even know.

All I know is it suits, it suits Tom Sawyer. And he gets right back to work.

And now like Ben's throwing off, like, well, this doesn't seem right.

And he's like, uh, I want to, I want to try it.

Tom, can I try it? I mean, I would like to try it. Can I try it, Tom? Oh, oh, man.

You know, a fence like this can't be painted by anybody. I mean,

this is a, this is a limited time. I only got a hundred yards of fence.

You know, that's not going to go very far. I can't be spending it out.

And suddenly Ben Rogers is in a moment of desperation.

I'll give you my apple. I got a yo-yo. And he starts offering up toys.

And Tom goes, well, if you insist.

And he collects some toys and more kids come by.

But of course, Ben, now that he thinks it's exciting, is having the time of

his life painting a fence. And his friends are saying, why is he having so much fun?

I can't give anyone a turn. There's a particular fence. And he starts collecting

toys, goods, and excitement.

He said, I'd have bankrupt the whole county if it hadn't been for the fact that I ran out of paint.

Three coats of paint on that fence because he tapped into a truth what if the

task that I'm doing is not something I had to do.

Something I get to do. What if, like Solomon, I said the best thing in life

is if you could find satisfaction in your work because you recognized before

you started that it's a gift.

And I know it doesn't always feel like that, but if you need help,

you just find an older person in your life who will repeat the words that Eleanor

Roosevelt said, that one of the great, the worst things about growing old,

she said, is the realization that you are infrequently,

not how much you are frequently no longer needed.

Because there's a drudgery to mowing your lawn, but there will come a time when

you will talk to people that will say, I wish I still could, but I can't any longer.

I am not strong enough as I once was. It will not always be there.

And I'm just stuck going to school. And you will talk to people who said,

I am not able to go to class any longer. I wish I could.

There are people who will help you recognize that because of life's brevity

is precisely why it has value as a gift because it is a momentary opportunity

you have on this particular day to use your talents and abilities to make a

difference in the lives of others if you recognize it as a gift.

But even more than that, those of us who follow the gospel do not have to approach

work for our meaning and identity.

For you have already been commissioned by a king to be part of his plan of redemption in the world.

And when the writer of Hebrews was describing the work of Jesus and it says,

who for the joy set before him endured the cross.

If Jesus could say the way I thought about enduring the cross,

though the work itself was unpleasant, but where it was going could be filled

with joy because I understood its purpose in what God was doing in the world.

I think it would help us to remind her that as in a moment when we gather around

this table, that all of us every Sunday, this, the first day of the week,

are commissioned to be his ambassadors in the world.

Whether you are working at a boardroom or at a restaurant in a work in a job

where you have many people under you or in one where you are just at an entry

level position all of them are capable of being redeemed by god to be used for

his purposes that god desired for you to make a difference in the world.

A man is never out of work, writes William Least Heat Moon when he wrote his

book on Highway Blues. A man is never out of work if he's worth something.

It's just sometimes he gets paid and sometimes he doesn't.

I got unpaid on my share and I got paid my share, but that's got nothing to

do with working, he writes.

You see, working is a man doing what he's supposed to do, and that's why he

needs a catastrophe every now and again, because a bad stroke will never stop

a good man from recognizing that.