Picture this: It’s another Monday morning. Millions of people worldwide are dragging themselves to work, their spirits heavy with an unseen weight. You’ve felt it too, haven’t you? That gnawing sensation that something fundamental is missing from our relationship with work.
Let me share a perspective that might illuminate why modern workplaces often feel like battlegrounds of broken dreams, deception, and emptiness.
From the very beginning, work had its origins in the spiritual. God commissioned man to tend to the earth. Or as the Old Testament of the Bible puts it in literal Hebrew – “listen to the land.” God expected man to execute this work with a heart of kindness in consonance with his agenda and plan. Work was meant to be our canvas for expressing divine purpose, allowing us to shape the world with kindness and excellence. It was linked to God’s plan and driven by God’s personality.
It was a responsibility, no doubt, but one that allowed man to shape the latent world in the Creator’s image and ensure that earth remained “good” – expressed in God’s standard of righteousness, goodness and excellence.
This arrangement went well for a time. Then sin caused a profound shift. Man was convinced that he could do work independently of God. He believed the lie. That lie took his existence – and everything about it including work – in a direction that no longer expressed God’s standards. Work became decoupled from purpose. This spiritual disconnection transformed work from a meaningful mission into what many experience today – a gruelling pursuit driven by three powerful forces: lust, greed, and the endless chase for status. Much of work and the economy of nations today still pivots on these three bases.
Today, the key difference between work as originally designed and work as you and I experience it today is not just in the activity that is done, but in the heart with which that activity is done and the spiritual influences under which that activity is executed.
That disconnect in the spiritual source of work has led to dark places for humanity and produced checkered progress, much like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Good on the surface, something else underneath the bark.
Look around your workplace and the business world today. Trusted companies are often discovered to be dubious, promising companies compromise and underdeliver, corporations mortgage society for profits, narcissistic personalities drive corporate entities and treachery is not such an uncommon thing in the boardroom or the workspace. Worldwide, there is a crushing disparity between effort and reward. And across all regions, the financial worth of value is decided by the most opportune, most powerful and scrupulously organized.
It’s like we’re all actors in a play where the script has been rewritten, yet we keep performing the original movements without understanding why they feel empty.
The good news is you can choose to break out of that circle. And you can break out today. No, not by immediately or recklessly quitting your current job. But first by rediscovering what you have been divinely created to contribute to mankind. When you discover what inspires you to “listen to the land” – or something or someone on it, over it or in it – that singular focus and purpose becomes the basis for true work. True work that is not about channelling your or another man’s personality to the earth, but that is about becoming the conduit for the person of God to touch and infinitely change lives through you.
With that discovery of purpose, and your subsequent determination to start moving towards executing your assignment, excitement will return, channels for true work will sprout and fulfillment will emerge. That fulfillment will attract reward and true meaning – so that come Monday morning, work transforms from a burden into a calling and you don’t have to drag yourself to work again.