You Think Your Job Is Bad?

Today is Saturday...evening.   Tomorrow is Sunday (which is usually how it works out :) First Saturday....then Sunday...at least most weeks anyway....

The day went so fast!! The weekends always do.  Friday night starts out filled with promise and anticipation....Saturday morning comes...and goes before you know it.  Sunday morning follows (too closely) on its heels.  About 3 pm on Sunday, I get this sinking feeling.  The weekend is over.  Bummer. 

My job is not bad.  It is not the highest paying job...but neither is it the lowest.  My boss is a great guy.  He and I hit it off.  We are friends.  He is great to work for/with...BUT....some days I am bored to death with the details of what I have to do.  Data entry...meeting minutes (the WORST)...financial tracking...report writing...and answering the always ringing phone.  In addition to doing all the secretarial stuff, I also have to help man the help line.  Answering and processing the calls for service from all three hospitals...service or repairs needed from biomedical, housekeeping, dietary, maintenance, couriers and lately they have added patient transport to the list.  So the phone rings all the time.  ALL the time. 

I mentioned the Max Lucado book I read on our trip...The Cure For the Common Life. The gist of the book was to offer guidance and suggestions about how to devote our workday lives to God.....not confining our faith and Christian witness to Sunday but to live it out every day of the week (sort of like the comtemplatives in the market place way of thinking) To make him look good through us.

Heaven’s calendar has seven Sundays a week. God sanctifies each day. He conducts holy business at all hours and in all places. He uncommons the common by turning kitchen sinks into shrines, café’s into convents and nine to five workdays into spiritual adventures.

Ideally, he guides us to a job we both like AND excel at.  However, if we find ourselves stuck (for whatever reason) in a job we are not all that crazy about...or even a job we hate...well, bloom where you are planted. Do it as unto the Lord.  And as he often does, Max offers a story about someone who did just that. 

Hold it there. I saw you roll those eyes. You see no way God could use your work. Your boss has the disposition of a hungry pit bull; hamsters have larger work areas, your kids have better per diems. You feel threatened to the outposts of Siberia, where hope left on the last train. If so, meet one final witness. He labored eighteen years in a Chinese prison camp.

The Communist regime rewarded his faith in Christ with the sewage assignment. The camp kept its human waste in pools until it fermented into fertilizer. The pits seethed with stink and disease. Guards and prisoners alike avoided the cesspools and all who worked there, including the disciple.

After he’d spent weeks in the pit, the stench pigmented his body. He couldn’t scrub it out. Imagine his plight, far from home. But somehow this godly man found a garden in his prison. I was thankful for being sent to the cesspool. This was the only place where I was not under severe surveillance. I could pray and sing openly to our Lord. When I was there, the cesspool became my private garden.” He then quoted the words to the old hymn, I Come To The Garden Alone.

"I never knew the meaning of this hymn until I had been in the labor camp” he said.

God can make a garden out of the cesspool you call work, if you take him with you.

Now this guy had a really bad job.  This would be hard to top...even on the TV show about the world's worst jobs.  And yet...against overwhelming hardship, he knew how to look beyond this temporal realm and commune with God.  I am so not there yet.....