This weekend I had the opportunity to give a “Labor Day” talk on the topic of work and vocation, and I thought I’d share a sample for this week’s blog post…
I want to invite you to imagine your future. Not your tomorrow future, or even your ten years from now future, but your eternal future. Someday Jesus will return from heaven to restore this earth to its original glory. Jesus will set up his kingdom here on earth forever, and we humans will get to be a part of it. So what I want you to imagine is this… What will you be doing in Jesus’ eternal kingdom? What role will you be playing? More specifically, what kind of work will you be doing?
Maybe some of you are surprised and a bit confused when I ask you to think about the work you’ll be doing for eternity. You’re like—work?? Isn’t that what I’m hoping to escape when I get to heaven? I mean isn’t work sort of like death and weeping—it will be no more?
But what if I were to suggest that work existed in the Garden of Eden, before sin and evil entered the picture… and that the same work just might exist for eternity in Jesus’ fully restored earthly kingdom?
And… What if God created you with specific work in mind?
The Bible tells a story from beginning to end and the interesting thing to note is that the story basically ends up right where it began. If you’re familiar with the story you know that in the beginning God created humans in his image, and he entrusted them to be his earthly partners, to join him in the good work he was doing. The first chapters of Genesis tell us that humans were created with purpose for a very special vocation. God blessed the humans and he commissioned them, telling them to be fruitful and to rule over creation.
But, as you probably know, sin enters the story in chapter 3. Adam and Eve chose to believe the lies of a serpent, rather than trusting God, and from its very first pages the whole story began to fall apart. We see that the consequences of sin, more than anything else, would effect the humans’ work. Two kinds of work, to be exact. The work of producing children and the work of producing crops. Key to the human vocation was what God called “being fruitful” and the curse of sin negatively effected both the fruit of the womb and the fruit of the land.
Just over four weeks ago my newest grand-baby was born. When Nils and Brina recounted their birth story, Brina said something that made me laugh. She said, “Women are heroes!” In fact she pointed right at me through the phone camera, and she said something like, “You are an amazing woman!” Brina had experienced firsthand the very hard work of bringing a human into the world, and she understood it was no joke.
When Jesus was getting ready to die on the cross, he actually prepared his disciples with this comparison to childbirth.
“Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” (John 16:20-22)
When it comes to childbirth, the labor is painful, but the end result is joy. This is how it is with all of our fruit-bearing work. There will be “pain and toil” in this life, but that doesn’t mean the work itself is bad. The work of partnering with God to nurture and care for the world he created is good… and it is eternal.
Four years ago Kyle and I experienced a similar kind of grueling but rewarding work. We were building a house. We weren’t actually the builders, but we were our own general contractors, and we chose to do a ton of the labor ourselves. Now when I say “we” I am referring to Kyle and me, but let me be clear about my role and his. When it comes to construction and home improvement, Kyle has always been a natural. Even though he’s a math nerd by profession, my husband’s true love has always been creating and building stuff, and he is impressively capable. I on the other hand am a passable helper. Barely. To say I was Kyle’s assistant in home construction might have been a stretch, except for one thing. Over the course of the six months it took for us to finish our home, my husband’s right hip was literally wearing out. At first he could limp around with moderate pain. But by the end he could hardly walk. Kyle was in the hospital getting his new hip less than a week after we moved into our new home. Which is to say, the work Kyle and I did together on our house was a true partnership. He’d give the orders and I’d run around trying to gather the right supplies so he could finish each task. The fact is, though the work was truly excruciating at times, Kyle and I would both agree, it was some of the most truly satisfying work we’ve ever done.
A teacher and author named John Mark Comer wrote a book called Garden City: Work, Rest and the Art of Being Human. In his book Comer makes the following suggestion:
“Our work in this life is practice for our work in the coming life.”
This is something most of us have probably never even thought about. I know I hadn’t until recently.
We live here on earth between Eden and eternity. It’s the “now and the not yet” of Jesus’ kingdom. Some have compared our days on earth to days of exile. In many ways God’s people are strangers and aliens in this world, because it’s not our permanent home. But even while we live in this in-between space, we have real and important work to do. When the people of Israel were in their days of actual exile in Babylon, God sent sent a message to them through the prophet Jeremiah telling them to focus on flourishing in Babylon. He told the people to build houses and plant gardens, and to make Babylon a better place—to actually make it a place of blessing. (Jeremiah 29:4-7)
Which is why I’m asking you to dream for a minute. What does it look like for you to flourish while you’re here, in earth’s exile? What kind of work could you be doing that is life-giving, for you and those around you? Have you ever done some kind of work and thought, “This is actually the work God made me to do”?
There’s a story I especially like in the Old Testament about a time when the Holy Spirit empowered a man named Bezalel with special gifts to help with the creation of the tabernacle. The Spirit gave Bezalel wisdom and skills so he could do artistic work, creating things out of gold, silver, bronze, and precious stones. He was also given Spirit-empowered abilities for woodworking and craftsmanship. (Exodus 31:1-5)
And just as the Holy Spirit filled Bezalel with with practical and creative gifts… as followers of Jesus, the Holy Spirit fills each of us uniquely with gifts and abilities and even dreams and desires to be Jesus' partners in this life and for eternity.
Thinking about the connection between my current work and my eternal work has been helpful for me in two ways. First, it gives me a vision for finding purposeful work to do here and now. It makes me want to search out the work God has uniquely equipped me to do. Second, it takes the pressure off finding total fulfillment in my work here in this life, because I know this isn’t the whole story. I have all of eternity to partner with Jesus.
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