What looks like bad work to you? It can be a very personal thing – I was surprised when I told people about leading Redeem the Commute, and they said, “I’m glad someone is doing it, but especially glad it’s not me.”
I watched a TV show lately about a tow truck driver – it showed him going about his work in the middle of the night, doing a job many wouldn’t want. But he said he’d tried multiple jobs, hated them all – and then found the towing business and it just fit. He’d found his passion for work, even though other people would hate it working those late nights, alone, at risk and dealing with mechanical work.
There are definitely bad jobs out there – some are really awful, which became apparent with media coverage, for example, of the textile industry in Bangladesh.
Some jobs aren’t terrible themselves, they are just a bad fit.
And there are some good jobs that we see in the wrong light – something about us means they are less than they should be. We might think they’ll be much more than they are, or we might think too highly of ourselves to do certain kinds of work, even though they are good.
Question: What’s the worst job you ever had? What made it so bad? Was it bad for everyone, or just you?
Acknowledgements: Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavour and Work & Rest
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Yesterday we defined worship as giving worth to God, or in other words, acknowledging he is at the center of our lives, or we want him there if he isn’t.
Worship is about practicing God’s Presence. We can forget God is there in our busy lives, and something tangible can help. A friend of mine mentioned Elf on the Shelf on Facebook. Elf on the Shelf is a small elf doll that parents are supposed to hide somewhere in the house every night, claiming he is a “scout elf” who reports back to Santa. The elf becomes a visible symbol for small children who might forget that Santa is watching.
Worship is meant to be a visible symbol for those of us who might forget God is watching.
In the busyness of our everyday lives, we cannot always remember that God is with us. In spite of our best intentions we may find ourselves living and acting without regard to the fact that God is present in every aspect of our lives.
Sometimes we think something in our lives is coincidence, but God is actually doing something incredible. Sometimes we will find resources are suddenly supplied that we needed, and will think it was luck or our skills, when it was in fact God’s provision.
We want to develop an increasing sensitivity to God’s presence with us. We know that we develop skills and get better at things by practicing: an old saying reminds us practice makes perfect. It would be more truthful to say that practice reinforces, but in this case reinforcement is good enough. We need a way to reinforce our awareness of God’s presence in our lives.
Question: When have you seen God working in the last week? What seeming coincidences were there?
Reminder: Earlier in this series, we saw the importance of reading the Bible together in sync, so our new daily bible readings start today in our mobile app and web site.
This series looks at becoming “like family” with others learning to follow Jesus. We're exploring how the church is not a building, institution or event, but a community of people. It's important that explore what church means as we prepare to launch a new church in Ajax in 2014.
