Loving Mondays

Over my adult life, one of the things I’ve thought and prayed about has been work, and specifically, what it means for me as a Christian to live my faith in the workplace.

Some assumptions are packed into that statement. First, that my faith has a place where I work and in what I do. Second, for a Christian, work is a ministry field, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m a full-time missionary working overseas or a full-time writer or PR person working in a Fortune 500 company. The mission field is the mission field.

This doesn’t mean I preach in the hallways or hand out tracts in the cafeteria or corner people in their offices or cubicles and ask questions like “Have you ever thought about eternity?” That’s not me.

Instead, no matter where I’ve worked, I’ve tried (note I didn’t say “succeeded”) to live my faith. That is, I’ve strived to make my words and actions speak for my faith, or, more accurately, be my faith. Work is a gift from God, and like all gifts, there’s an expectation I be a good steward.

It hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been downright hard. I’ve tripped up. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve struggled with all of the contradictions and inconsistencies and failings that are the workplace, and that are me. I’ve seen the workplace soar with human achievement, and I’ve seen the workplace descend with a viciousness and human destructiveness that’s astounding.

The workplace is a lot like life because it is life.

Over at the High Calling Blogs (HCB), Laura Boggess is starting a discussion of Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business without Selling Your Soul by John D. Beckett. The book is about the application of Biblical principles to the workplace. I’m joining the discussion, and I’ll be blogging here on Mondays for the next several weeks about what I’m reading and thinking, and commenting on the posts at HCB.

Laura is one of the editors at HCB, and she blogs at The Wellspring. I did a blog post about her back in December. She’s a great, and faithful, discussion leader, and this promises to be a deep and wide discussion.

Read her first post on Loving Mondays.