Liking the thing we have to do....

I cleaned out some of my office drawers yesterday...to make room for some new highlighters and paper clips and other assorted office supplies.  To tell the truth, the drawers were very messy and disorganized.  In fact, I found a bunch of stuff I didn't even know I had.  Among those things -- a planner that my boss gave me back in December.  Just a freebie passed out to the managers by the health system that employs us. So yesterday before I pitched it(along with a lot of other stuff like bent paperclips, scraps of paper, emery boards with no "emery" left etc. etc.)  I leafed through the planner. There was a quote for every week of the year.  It contained several interesting ones. 

One spoke of blessings--and went something like...

For once I'd like to get a blessing not disguised as something else. 

I wrote that quote down...at work...which is where it remains so I cannot give credit where credit is due...but it definitely has that ring of truth to it.  So many of our blessings do not show up in a "this is great" costume...and it takes a while to realize that the dreaded, "oh no, not that" circumstance is actually a blessing hiding behind the illusion of adversity. But let's not go there.  Exploring that concept is worthy of a post all of its own.  

So anyway...I came upon another quote in the little planner and emailed it to myself here at home. This is it...word for word... 

It is not doing the thing we like to do but liking the thing we have to do that makes life blessed. Goethe.

For one who was totally ignorant about scripture for most of my life, it is odd that I so often think biblically.  As in...when I hear a quote or a snippet from a movie...a post on someone's blog or even some phrase or parable in a sacred writing that is not (gasp) Christian, Bible verses come to mind.  How weird is that?

I think there are several people/situations I can attribute that too.  annie is one.  She fills her writings with scripture...but not just proof texts...scripture in context with the situation she is writing about.  Another is Keith, who has quoted much scripture to me over the years we have been together...and often what he has lifted from the pages of the Bible comes to mind in the context of old man/new man, Christ nature/ adamic nature (or in Tolle speak egoic mind/Presence).  And of course, God is kind enough to dig these scripture snippets out of the archives in my head and "bring them to my remembrance."  And then there is google to help me find exactly where the verse is...and Studylight....Bible Gateway and the Blueletter Bible where I can read the verse in many different translations and find the definition of certain words in the original language.  God is good.   

So..all that to say that when I read those two quotes, the following verses came to mind.  They arrived here on my blog in their entirety (with chapter and verse included) via the process described in the paragraph above. 

Colossians 3:23 Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men.

Ephesians 6:7 With good will render service, as to the Lord, and not to men.

For those of us with jobs we are not really enamored with, would it help to look at our work as service rendered unto the Lord?  Is that the path to liking the thing we have to do?  It hasn't worked yet for me :)

A while back I wrote a post based about a snippet from a Max Lucado book about a guy with the world's worst job....yet he found joy in it.  Maybe I can too?