Can Camels Shrink? Or Only Grow?

Jim Wood, long known as @shrinkingcamel on Twitter before he threw off the cloak of anonymity and embraced his public persona, is “retiring” as the Work Editor at The High Calling this week.  

I met Jim online before I met him in person. It was via a web site devoted to faith and work, and this guy known only as Bradley Moore (a pseudonym) was commenting and posting. The site was retired a couple of years ago, but I had followed the camel over to his blog, and then we followed each other on Twitter.

One summer Saturday afternoon in 2009, the camel, Laura Barkat and I were tweeting on Twitter, the subject of the movie Bottle Crazy came up, and we exchanged a few lines of poetry. It was a fun thing to do, but that exchange led to poetry jams on Twitter and ultimately to the creation of Tweetspeak Poetry.

At the time, Laura was managing editor of The High Calling, and it wasn’t long before she enticed Jim to become the Work Editor and me a contributing editor.  Most of the articles I’ve written for The High Calling have been on work, and Jim has been my editor. He’s one of those editors who make it easy for a writer to write. We eventually got to meet face-to-face at an editorial retreat at Laity Lodge.

Jim’s the author of At Work As It Is in Heaven (I reviewed it here). I interviewed him at The High Calling about the book.

Now he’s headed back to college (with college-age daughters himself) to finish his MBA. And stay employed at his executive job (responsible for lots of stuff and people). And so he told us a few weeks back that he would be retiring from The High Calling.

It’s one of those decisions friends make that give you both joy and sadness at the same time.

And so, for Jim Wood:

Can Camels Shrink? Or Only Grow?

I saw a camel spit before

but never saw a camel shrink,

never saw a camel sink

at the oasis. One hump

or two, camels find it difficult

to slip through the eye of a needle,

even when lathered with olive oil.

I watch a camel slip away,

I watch a camel embrace his MBA.

I wish the camel well

at the oasis.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Eleventh Day of Christmas: A Shrunken Camel

He’s a business executive, a senior business executive with a VP title. He works for a diversified company in the Northeast; I’m not sure which one exactly but he knows a lot about my company which tells me that some of that diversification relates to agriculture. He’s written for the Conference Board Magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, Sales Gravy and a lot of other publications. He’s been a management consultant. He likes being in the executive suite, and, as he’s written in a formative essay, he likes making money.

He also wrestles with issues of faith in the workplace, and he’s one of the most thoughtful and articulate writers on the subject out there.

His name is Bradley Moore. His blog is Shrinking the Camel. He’s also an editor at the High Calling Blogs, and he’s one of the key organizers for conference held at Princeton University on transforming the workplace. His writings are also regularly featured at InsideWork. An example is his essay on leadership and power. And he makes no apology for business and work – there’s no inherent contradiction between business and faith. Read the linked essay at the end of the “What is Shrinking the Camel all about?” on his blog.

His writing is brash, enthusiastic and irreverent, and he doesn’t hesitate to take on sacred cows. He’s also unfailingly positive (it’s a good antidote for me who leans to a slightly – not much but slightly – more negative view of organizations and management).

Read Bradley’s blog. Follow him on Twitter. Check out his links (he reads more journals and publications than just about anyone I’ve run across). You’ll learn a lot about faith, the workplace, business and organizational life.

And you’ll get to meet a pretty cool guy – who’s proving that a camel can shrink enough to fit through the eye of the needle.


(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)

Performance Reviews: The Bad

At the High Calling Blogs Tuesday, my friend Bradley Moore (Shrinking the Camel) posted “How Important is Your Image?” The article is about the peer review process as part of an individual’s overall performance appraisal, and then goes deeper into a discussion about image and performance. Over the years, performance appraisal processes have become something of a major industry. And there are all kinds of facets to them – peer reviews, performance reviews, results reviews, L-180s (where team leaders are appraised anonymously by their team members), and L-360s (where an individual is appraised anonymously by supervisor, subordinate, peers, colleagues on other teams), among a lot of others.

While the article was mostly about whether or not image was more important than performance, and what kind of image that was, I keyed in on the performance review part. I hate performance reviews, and not because they aren’t (theoretically) valuable. The comment I posted on Bradley’s article went something like this:

I’ve had performance reviews for almost my entire career, except for the four years I was an independent consultant. I can recall a few that were okay in terms of how they were conducted, many that were totally inept, but very few that were good. When I started doing them myself for people on my team, I generally had no role models to emulate, and basic HR guidelines that rarely applied, except for what to avoid doing. So I looked to biblical principles — be fair, be honest, talk about the hard stuff, give credit where it was due, and always affirm the worth of the person.

I should have added that performance reviews should go on all the time and not just once or twice a year. The mantra I chant until I drive people crazy is “No surprises at mid-year and annual reviews. No surprises. Not one surprise, good or bad.” My theory here is, if a problem comes up, you deal with when it happens, not months later. If someone is a consistently poor performer, you’re doing no one any good by saying nothing or trying to transfer them elsewhere. Or if someone deserves recognition or celebration, you do it right then, when everyone understands and sees the connection. So, no surprises at review time.

If you think I speak from experience, you are entirely correct. Too much experience. Since college, I’ve had six employers, seven if I include myself. Before I graduated from college, I had three, so formally and informally, that makes a total of 10. And from those 10, I’ve collectively learned there are at least four kinds of bad performance reviews.

The Zinger. You’ve had a bang-up performance year, you’re firing on all eight cylinders, and choirs of managers have been singing your praises. Your boss knows it and appreciates it. But he can’t give you a 100 percent positive review, because he never had one like that, he doesn’t want to give you the big head, and he believes that no one does all good. So he comes up with – the zinger. This is a simple comment designed to throw the individual totally off balance, something that has never been spoken about, something so totally out of left field that you can’t respond as your boss smilingly adds it to “development needs.”

I had one boss who turned the zinger into an art form. All of us who reported to him experienced it, and we occasionally took bets on what he’d come up with for the current year. For me, it usually some variation of “You’re not aggressive enough.” The first time he hit me with it, I didn’t know what to say. It worked so well that first time that he tried it again the next year, but I was ready and asked, “And how did that affect my performance?” That flustered him. The third time he pitched it at me again, but he had an answer to my question: “It didn’t affect your performance, but it affects management’s perceptions of you.” So I started getting more aggressive – with him. When I said that’s what he had told me to do, he said, “I didn’t mean with me!” Third time was the charm. He went on to something else.

The Non-Performance Review. The non-performance review happens when your boss doesn’t like doing reviews, and will talk about absolutely anything other than your performance: sports, the weather, his kids, your kids, his car, the carpeting on the floor, the light fixtures, you-name-it. It’s not that there are problems he wants to avoid talking about, it’s just he hates – hates! – getting so personal and has learned that a performance review, done properly, makes him as vulnerable as it does you.

Over the years, I’ve had performance reviews that offered opportunities to discuss movies and Broadway plays, the latest non-fiction bestseller, problems with other people on the team (like peers), favorite cocktails, restaurants and pets, among other things. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back to the subject at hand. And then the time would elapse, and the boss would breathe a huge sigh of relief.

For these, you have to pay close attention to what gets written down, because you won’t know what your appraisal is until you see it. (I refused to sign one of these once – an act deemed equivalent to starting the French Revolution.)

The Image Review. This type of performance review has less to do with your performance than it does with your boss’s perceptions of the perceptions of “management,” which he’s often responsible for. So the image review becomes a kind of tea-leaf-reading exercise, in which you try to discern which “perceptions of management” are actually your boss’s own personal perceptions and which belong to someone else. And who "management" actually is.

This one is tough on the person being reviewed. It helps to have some years of experience here, because you have to know how things work and you have to be fast on your feet in responding. I was once told, for example, that “management” had a problem with my team leadership capabilities because my people liked working for me, the expectations being, apparently, that you were a better team leader if they didn’t like you, so treat them badly. So I said, “Look at their performance and tell me how it could have been improved by browbeating them.” The response was a sullen look. I wish I was making this up.

The Hybrid Performance Review. This one usually combines the Image Review and the Zinger. Performance is barely mentioned; instead, you get a combination of “management’s perceptions” and a series of zingers. I may hold the record for this, in fact. In one one-hour review, performance was discussed in less than 15 seconds – a kind of grunt – and then it was a series of perception zingers, all of which were totally baseless and some of which were actually the perceptions about my boss, and we both knew it.

I would like to say I did the kind, understanding, Christian thing. I didn’t. I was so outraged that I fought back, and hard. I refuted everything. Met with a “but this is management’s perception” response, I hit back with “and you were responsible for almost all of that,” and then explained that in detail.

This wasn’t a performance review; it was a boxing match. No, that’s too nice. It was an ugly street brawl. Bridges got burned. It was just plain bad. Whenever you have one of these with your boss, you lose. By definition.

As I said in my comment to Bradley’s post, it all should down to this: Be fair. Be honest. Talk about the hard stuff when it happens, not during the review. Give credit where it’s due. Always affirm the worth of the person.

And no surprises.

Tomorrow: the good review performance reviews.

A Book Review on Work, and TweetSpeak Poetry

A few weeks back, my friend Bradley Moore asked if I would be interested in writing a book review for his blog. Bradley is a business executive in the Northeast, who writes about business and spirituality at Shrinking the Camel. He writes cool stuff, raising questions that stimulate, provoke and make you think. This morning, he posted the book review I wrote for his blog, on Alain de Botton's The Joys and Pleasures of Work.

Last night, just my wife and I were getting ready to go to a concert (Dee Dee Bridgewater, if you're interested), an email arrived from one of my online poetry co-conspirators, Eric Swalberg. He was letting me and Laura Barkat, the other main co-conspirator, know that TweetSpeak Poetry was live and ready to rock. This is the place where we'll be placing all of the "twoems" from our twitter poetry jams. (Laura invented the name "twoem," for Twitter poem. I invented the name "twepic," for twitter epic, which is what one of the twoems turned into.)

Our first jam was Sept. 9; our second on Sept. 22; and our third and most recent on Sept. 30. Other online poets have joined us from time to time, and we've collected all of the tweets at @tspoetry (when we remember to use the hashtag) and on this blog, where I've taken all three and edited them.

We had a technical glitch last night (that means we've really, really arrived) but the site is back up; I posted the first "twoem" this morning. It's entitled "At the Oasis, The Camel on Caravan," in honor of Bradley Moore, who wasn't able to participate.

A poetry journal launched, a book review published -- I thought Sundays were supposed to be quiet.

A Movie, A Photo, Some Tweets and a Poem

This is a story about Twitter, and poetry, and a movie. And how the human mind works.

Based in Tennessee, Randy Elrod is a speaker, consultant, chef, wine connoisseur, artist and general all-around culture creator. Last Saturday, he and some friends were concluding a Napa Valley winery tour. He had been tweeting the tour and posting pictures on Twitpic, inspiring the grand old sin of envy in any of us who had been following his progress. He posted a photo of a special bottle of wine – a 1973 California Chardonnay that changed the course of the wine industry and wine history. And he pointed out that this was the wine that was featured in the movie “Bottle Shock.”

My wife and I had seen that movie and enjoyed it. I retweeted Randy’s comment with the photo. L.L. Barkat saw my retweet and said she loved that movie. And then Shrinking the Camel chimed in – he had seen it and liked it as well.

And here’s what developed. “Recreate” is Randy’s Twitter name.

recreate http://twitpic.com/gl3oo - If you've seen the movie "Bottle Shock," this is the bottle that changed the world

gyoung9751: Cool movie RT @recreate: http://twitpic.com/gl3oo - If you've seen the movie "Bottle Shock" this is the bottle that changed the world

llbarkat: @gyoung9751 I LOVED that movie 'Bottle Shock.'

shrinkingcamel: Me Too! Saw a couple wks ago. RT @llbarkat: @gyoung9751 I LOVED that movie 'Bottle Shock.'

gyoung9751: Like minds? RT @shrinkingcamel: Me Too! RT @llbarkat: @gyoung9751 I LOVED that movie 'Bottle Shock.'

llbarkat: Okay @shrinkingcamel and @gyoung9751 this feels like a party now. :)

gyoung9751: It does indeed. Camel should write a poem. RT @llbarkat: Okay @shrinkingcamel and @gyoung9751 this feels like a party now. :)

shrinkingcamel: On the phone for 2.5 hours so far with Dell OnCall helping fix a computer bug. I planned 4 hours. Helps to plan for the worst. Almost done!

shrinkingcamel: A poem? While I'm on the line with Dell? And Tweeting? That's way too much multi-tasking. (Plus I'm making a sandwich)

gyoung9751: Camel's too slow For @llbarkat & @shrinkingcamel Flickering screen/Reflecting/Golden liquids;/Binding friends/Not met but real.

shrinkingcamel: @gyoung9751 @llbarkat AMAZING. Flickering screen/Reflecting/Golden liquids;/Binding friends/Not met but real.

llbarkat: RE: Camel's too slow for @llbarkat . Okay @gyoung9751 and @shrinkingcamel , you two officially inspired next week's RAP. :)

gyoung9751: @llbarkat & @shrinkingcamel Sounds like young and camel will be singing a RAP song about Chardonnay. Signing off.

llbarkat: @gyoung9751 @shrinkingcamel Sounds like young and camel will be singing a RAP song about Chardonnay. Signing off.<<<> wait and see.

A “RAP” is a Random Act of Poetry, a weekly feature on The High Calling Blogs that’s written and managed by L.L. And she was true to her word (or threat) – our exchange helped inspire the RAP article posted yesterday on how people bind together after tragedies like 9/11. And then, in the comments, RAP participants spontaneously began writing poems. Here is the column and the comments.

The fun thing is – shrinkingcamel got bit by the poetry bug. "Shrinking the Camel" is the name of a blog on faith in the workplace. Shrinkingcamel is the Twitter name. The person who does the blog and the Twitter account goes by a pseudonym; all we know is that he’s a business executive who lives in the northeastern United States. There is a real name somewhere behind the curtain (or underneath the camel). I keep things simple by referring to him as Camel.

So a photo of a bottle of wine connected three online friends to a movie, inspired a short poem, produced a column on poetry and 9/11 AND led to a camel writing poetry. Only on Twitter. Incredible. And our thanks to Randy Elrod for (unknowingly) setting the whole thing in motion.

My poem, as composed on Twitter and recomposed by L.L. Barkat for the RAP:

For @llbarkat and @shrinkingcamel

Flickering screen
Reflecting
Golden liquids;
Binding friends
Not met but real.
– by @gyoung9751, while drinking Chardonnay

L.L. added the Chardonnay bit. I wasn’t drinking Chardonnay when I wrote it, but what the heck, it sounds like I should have been.

Photo ©Randy Elrod, Sept. 5, 2009. Used with permission.

Poem for Shrinking the Camel

Last night, three of us likely shocked a few followers with a series of 49 tweets on Twitter that were a kind of poetry jam. Suggested by L.L. Barkat, this jam or “twoem” lasted slightly over an hour and included TchrEric and myself. There had been the possibility of a fourth, our friend Shrinking the Camel, but, alas, another commitment took him away from the oasis. So in his (absent) honor, we have this.

At the Oasis, The Camel on Caravan
By llbarkat, TchrEric and gyoung9751

Who were you in my dream?
The mermaid asked,
Herself the tears that feared to live.

I was the snow white hart, leaping from the touch.
I was the fish the mermaid shadowed.
I was the story in the burning book.
I was the fork, golden and shining.

I was a clearing
Ringed and shadowed
With evergreens.
I was the altar flickering blue,
The moonlight ringed by heaven,
The ever in the green.

I was the candle burning lonely.
I was the panel of glass,
The wind that knocked at the glass.
I was the lateness in the night.

I was a drop of wax aside the candle.
I was the sound of shattering of gold.
I was the chattering night, wishing sweet dreams.
I was the kitchen fire, the fire hearth,
The flame that laughed at goodbye.

I was the camel that knelt
At the eye of the needle.
I was the memory
That lay behind
The departed.
I was the threatening slumber.
I was the memory
Cluttered with stars.

I was the awakening of the stars
To a new day.

I was the twittering
That arose from dark corners.
I was the black hole,
Filled by grace.
I was the crimson-laced grace.
I was the curtain that brushed your face.
I was the morning
Mourning the night.

I was the oddness
That twisted the light.
I was the wholeness that became the holy.
I was the mourning
That wept.
I was the tears,
Coursing down cheeks.
I was the clock
That ticked near the wall.

I was the wish
For a teacher and a camel,
Who instead became
A pastel artist
Of prayers and seedlings
And green inventions.

Who were you in my dream?

The Work-Faith Thing

My friend Bradley Moore over at Shrinking the Camel blew my socks off this morning with his post, “Lord, Wilt Thou Not Leadest My Blog to Reach 1,000 Page Views per Day?” (Great title, by the way.) He’s asking a question, though it’s not stated that way, and it’s a question that has dogged me my entire professional life: How does this thing called faith work its way into and out of this thing called work?

At least a few of us struggle with this. I’ve been in a workplace of one sort or another since 1973, and if I count all those summers in high school I worked at my father’s printing and mailing business and the two years I worked at the college newspaper, it goes back even longer. But since 1973, at every place I worked, I’ve had to wrestle with the very questions Brad raises in his post.

What’s the spiritual purpose of my career and work? What about the inevitable conflicts with ambition and drive? How do I live my faith in an environment when the pressure to conform is almost unbearable, and I see older, wiser and more mature believers than me buckle under that, and leave their faith at the office door? And what about the office politics – how do I live my faith but not be consumed by what goes on all around me, but still somehow survive it? How do I deal with stress and burnout (and I’ve had to deal with both over the years)?

There aren’t many how-to books on this. For a long time, I thought I was living a kind of monkish, solitary life in the workplace. It was lonely, and I struggled with that loneliness. I worked at a newspaper for a short time, then a Fortune 100 oil company, and then a Fortune 100 chemical company. Except for a short, three-year stint as an independent consultant and almost a year working for an urban school district (one in total, chaotic crisis), my work has been defined by what we know, or believe we know, as corporate America.

About 10 years ago, I worked with a career coach for a few months. And she was good; she knew her stuff. I went through a number of exercises, long talks, assignments, more talks. Somewhere in the middle of process, she expressed amazement. “How have you managed to work in corporate America for as long as you have? They usually force people like you out early on – the antibodies go to work and attack the mutant.” She had a point.

I came to where I work today as an “independent contributor” – hired to do a very specific set of things and manage a very specific set of issues. It was generally stuff completely different from what everyone else in the department did. After about a year, I was pulled into fixing a problem with a speech, right at the last minute (“I fix problems” should probably be the at the top of my CV). That led to doing some speeches for the next year-and-a-half, while still doing my original job. Then I was asked to sub as corporate web site editor while the department searched for a new one. That was a blast, but I was still doing my original job and the speeches, too. A few months later, I was given two people to lead, from a completely different area. That year, the two became five, became 8, became 10. I hired a consultant to help us figure out how to be a team. Things began to hum and then soar. The whole department was then expanded, and my 10 became 24. And, oh, what work we have done, and what results we have achieved!

It’s worked the other way, too. Sometimes being too successful isn’t the best course. Sometimes responsibilities are taken away or redefined. Sometimes you go back to where you started.

Through all of this, I’ve wrestled with issues of faith. How do I respond? What do I do, or not do?

I don’t have definite answers. If I did, I’d write a best-seller and be paid astronomical fees to give speeches full of profound thoughts. But instead of answers, I keep finding myself with more questions. And it doesn't get easier with age and experience.

But I know this: I can’t be who I’m not. I have to be who I am, warts and all. Like my friend Brad, my calling isn’t to distribute tracts to my co-workers or pitch Bible verses across cubicles. Nor is it to give in to the sweet siren song of "leave your faith outside the workplace."

I’ve learned this: to take a genuine interest in people; to live your faith regardless of how you struggle with that and how much you mess up; to treat people with the dignity and grace they deserve because, like me, they’re made in God’s image and are valuable simply because of that – these are a little of what faith in the workplace may be about. But just a little.

Brad’s going to be posting additional thoughts on all of this, and I suspect it’s going to be a fine series of reads.

Shrinking the Camel and Inside Work

I’ve written before about a blog called Shrinking the Camel that I follow closely. It’s done by a business executive named Bradley Moore, who lives and works “somewhere in the northeast U.S.” In addition to his own blog, he also posts on a site called Inside Work, which is all about the practice of faith in the workplace. And yes, I follow that site closely as well, and not only for Bradley’s posts. There is a whole group of terrific writers and thinkers – and they write about faith and business. They don't write about the application of business practices to the church -- an affliction in the church in America for more than two decades. Instead, the writers at Inside Work look at the practice of faith in the workplace.

Yesterday on Inside Work, Bradley posted an article called “How God Saved My Life through Writing.” And he talks about how he came to start writing the Shrinking the Camel blog in 2008. It’s honest writing, writing from the heart.

How I happened across Bradley’s blog, as well as the Inside Work site, is one of those stories about how the web works. I was reading a blog post on a writing web site, and saw an interesting comment by a guy named Marcus Goodyear, an editor and poet who's actually written a poem for his wife about the Large Hadron Collider -- and had it published. I clicked on his name, and landed at his web site, Goodwordediting.com. One of the things he does is serve as an editor at a site called HighCallingBlogs.com, a collection of blogs that look at the entire world as a place to practice faith, including the culture (a shocking notion, I know). One of those links took me to Inside Work, where I found an article written by Bradley – and I clicked through to Shrinking the Camel (cool name for a blog, by the way).

And this process continues. At the High Calling site, I read a post about poetry by a writer named L.L. Barkat -- clicked through to her blogs (there are three, including Seedlings in Stone), and am now getting ready to start her book Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places.

In his latest article at Inside Work, Bradley writes about how he began writing – disillusionment with evangelical Christianity, a sudden skepticism about the Bible, angst and burnout with his career – and he discovered that God was creating a new work in him through the whole process (my words, not Bradley’s). Reading those words evoked a powerful sense of identification. I’ve gone through a long period of skepticism, not about the Bible, but about the contemporary American church. Having gone through a disastrous experience with a church that embraced every business fad found on the bestseller list, and wrecked anything in its path that might stop its quest for cultural relevance, I pulled back, and pulled back hard. And angst and burnout with my career? Yes, I've known that, too, a couple of times at least.

About three years ago, I started writing a novel, and actually finished it, along with a sequel and a plan for a series. Some of the partially completed “volumes” in the series have as many as 40,000 words or more. And I learned something, the same thing that Bradley has. Writing has been a means for me to begin coming to grips with what happened to my church, and what happened to my faith. In an odd way, writing is like having a conversation with God.

I’m still on that road. Finding the Bradley Moores of this world is like having a fellow pilgrim come alongside.

Inside Work

The Sabbath was originally a day of rest from one's labors, so I suppose some thinking on Sunday about work may be a kind of contradiction in terms. But it's been on my mind a lot lately, for a lot of varied reasons.

I've been spending some time exploring a web site called Inside Work. Here's what it says in the site's "About Us" section: "InsideWork® infuses business innovation with biblical insight to stimulate change in our work, organizations and marketplace." The articles are thoughtful and thought-provoking, challenging and sometimes provocative -- and never dull. I'm so used to experiencing business beliefs flooding the church that it's actually refreshing to read about biblical beliefs addressing the workplace.

Right now the current articles featured on the site are about corporate strategic vision (it's not about technology or change; it's about character); defending one's self in the workplace (David and Psalm 69); what it means to really love the customer (a short treatise about Starbuck's); why God love commerce; and the idea of a mission statement.

One regular contributor is a business executive named Bradley Moore, who works in the northeast U.S. and has a blog always worth reading called "Shrinking the Camel." (The name of the blog alone speaks volumes about its content.) (If you're not biblically inclined, it has to do with the statement in the New Testament that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.) Brad writes about the practice of faith in the workplace -- not so much talking about it as doing it. He's written the current article on Inside Work on loving the customer at Starbuck's.

Inside Work has become one of my favorite web sites about work. Take a look.

When Work Isn't Work

I've been discovering a whole raft of online conversations going on right now about work and faith. Inside Work, for example, is an entire web site devoted to the subject of faith in work and business, and contains some of the most intelligent conversation I've run across on the subject. Another site (or blog, to be specific), Red Letter Believers, had a post about it yesterday, asking the provocative question, does work matter? A blog I particularly like is Shrinking the Camel, written by a business executive in the northeastern U.S., and it's all about work, with an occasional digression about family and children. Which is also work, come to think about it, the most difficult work/mission we can encounter.

The workplace can be a tough mission field, but likely no tougher than anywhere else. I've learned that, like most situations, what you do at work matters vastly more than what you say. So you have to be conscious of what you say and how well it connects to what you do, but the doing is the critical part. When people see something different in the workplace, they want to know why. So they watch, and sometimes they ask.

I've found this works in two ways. First, if people think you're serious about your faith, they expect you to be different. They don't expect the same profanity and politicking they experience with everyone else. This is where I've seen business people trip up -- it's almost as if they deliberately keep their faith out of the workplace because "you have to play the business game to be successful." I've heard some Christian business people actually articulate this. And I've been on the receiving end a few times -- surprised (walloped, actually) by actions and words I never would have expected from a fellow believer. I'm older now, and have to keep reminding myself that God continues to work on me, too.

But second, there's a more positive sense of how faith can operate in the workplace. Work has been hard from the beginning; God never told Adam that it would be a slam dunk. But He also gave us the ability to create and innovate, to encourage others to create and innovate, and possibly to provide air cover so people can create and innovate. I've found that most organizations tend to reject creativity and innovation until circumstances force them to accept it. (I also have a theory about this -- that change comes to a profession primarily from outside the profession, because it's too threatening to one's notions of expertise and control. And it is threatening. Look at newspapers; they're dying because of the change coming from outside traditional journalism.)

But what might be accomplished if I, as a believer in the workplace, help people create and innovate? Might people see a glimpse of the ultimate Creator?

I figure it's worth a shot.

These online discussions about work have also prompted me to look at what I'm doing with my writing. Up until now, I haven't thought of my writing as work. There's no question that it's hard, frustrating and often a struggle. But have I thought of it as work?

I realized that writing is exactly that -- work. And the same rules that apply to my job at the office apply to my writing. Am I doing what everyone else is doing? Is it the same old rut? Or is it creative? Does it offer a fresh voice? Is it purposeful?

And most of all -- does it please God?