The grace of God, who gave me a job

My journey from career counselor to current day.

When I was in college, I got a job as a career counselor. I’m still not sure who let me do that. It’s not every day a 19 year old gets paid to sit down with people and help them figure out what they want do with “the rest of their lives,” but it’s still my favorite job to date. Day in and day out, I got to ask people what they were passionate about, what they liked doing, and how I could help them walk through a decision making process.

I was trained in career assessments and resources and the like, but more often than not, my job was to be a sounding board: to listen, to learn, and to bear witness to who people were already becoming. There was nothing like watching peoples’ eyes light up with passion as they talked about teaching or technology or different types of entrepreneurship. I marveled at the diversity of our interests, praising God I didn’t have to be an engineer if others were better equipped to do so. I even liked the creativity of the problem solving process, identifying what the world’s needs are, where their talents lived, and how these people might go about filling that empty void.

It was holy work, I had a feeling, though I didn’t quite have the words for it. I don’t know who let me do that at 19, but I’m glad they did. It sparked an interest in me that still has yet to be snuffed out.

---

I don’t often talk about my day job on this platform, but seeing as though I’m in the midst of a work conference, I thought today might be the day.

I work for a parachurch organization called Made to Flourish, which equips churches to close the “Sunday to Monday gap” as we call it. We have resources like the award winning Common Good magazine, a vocational insights tool called Scatter, and right now, I’m running a three day conference that gathers churches to dive deep on how the church’s vocations can inform their worship services, discipleship, and missional strategies.

We do a lot more, too, but that’s a good start. I’ve been at this work for (going on) seven years now, and to be honest, I didn’t know what the company was when I first got the job. In fact, I didn’t realize what our mission was for about the first month.

With time and God’s grace, I eventually figured it out. And with time (and God’s humor) I learned it couldn’t have been a more perfect vocational fit.

---

That tie between faith and work hasn’t always been obvious to me. As much as I loved my work at the career center, it was only a piece of my life, and a rather segmented piece at that.

In college, I was extremely involved in a variety of things like changing my major every few weeks, selling my soul to the marching band, and taking part in my campus ministry. While I loved learning new things like anthropology and swing dancing, a large portion of my life involved leading small groups, discipling women, and becoming well trained in both theology and practice. I really did adore my campus ministry. I tell people all the time it changed my life, because it did. It taught me how to sit with Jesus, to live in community, and how to show up in service to my neighbor.

However, these two passions of mine–work and faith–were almost entirely divorced. I fully believed the work of Christ on the cross matter. I was completely sold out for God, as they say.

Yet I still had a sense that the work I was doing in academics and aptitude tests mattered, too. I knew God cared about saving souls and the spiritual realm and all that jazz, but anyone had yet to affirm that things like manufacturing and marketing and anything non-missions mattered, too. I didn’t have an answer when people asked, “What does God have to do with work?” and I wasn’t sure how to respond when people asked “What are you doing with your one precious life?”

If you know me, you know instead of answering this question, I escaped it instead. I couldn’t live with the dissonance, so I went on a binge for adventure instead, insisting that if I couldn’t figure it out, I’d have fun in the meantime. I spent a year working seasonally at Walt Disney World, the Rocky Mountains, and Northern Ireland to name a few. I lived it up, loved it all, and even so, by the end of that year, my story of work still felt askew.

It wasn’t until I stumbled into a job at this place called Made to Flourish that God caught up with me. He took his time, as he does, and eventually he plopped me in a place which specialized in questions like these. Little did I know there were real ties between faith and work. That people much smarter than me had been digging into this dissonance for years.

I learned that Jesus’s work as a carpenter shaped his ministry after 30 years. I learned that in the Bible, God introduces himself as a worker far before he introduces himself a Savior. That Moses met God through a burning bush at his office. That Joseph struggled with his calling. And that God didn’t just love architects and accountants and economists; it turns out he loves architecture and accounting and economics, too.

That learning curve was steep for me. I thought back to what might’ve been different if I’d heard these truths sooner. I hold no regrets about twists and turns of my life, but it did make me wonder what might’ve been different had I not divorced faith and work. What might’ve been connected in the way of career and calling.

---

Fast forward to my work a few years later. I’m currently traveling; writing to you from my hotel. I’m in the midst of training seven churches who care deeply about integrating their Sunday worship with Monday’s work; people who’ve dedicated their time and talent to learning their peoples’ working realities and wrestlings, albeit in factories, fields, homes, and hospitals.

There are a lot of things I love about my job. I love getting to teach a more robust theology of work. I love shephering those who’ve spent their lives believing their work wasn’t worship. I love making churches healthier by thinking more holistically. And I love supporting people as they pose questions; not as threats, but as portals to broader thinking.

But as much as I love my work, I love the God who placed me here with purpose. I often assured people at a career counselor that “God cares about your path!” even when I wasn’t sure of it myself. Interestingly enough, it was Christians who were the most worked up about finding their vocational fit, relenting that God might be mad if they made a mistake.

But I can tell you from experience, this many years later, that God did care for my path, even if I didn’t know it. He cared for me at 19 and 21 and 25 and now 30. He cared for me when I wrestled and when I wondered; when I ran and when I rested. Not every job was a perfect fit, but God’s presence on the path never left my side.

In school, we recently talked about defining God’s grace as more than forgiveness. While we think of grace as “mercy,” it’s better defined as “God’s work” or “God at work,” ranging from forgiveness to empowerment and many things in between.

God’s grace, for me, often showed up in the form of job listings. It’s not lost on me that God gave me a job at 19 to wrestle through this story of work early in my career. It’s not lost on me he gave me a job at Disney to get me away from the dissonance I felt as I wrestled deeply with my questions. And it’s not lost on me that God redeemed my story of work, not through theological lesson or liturgy, but by giving me a job here and helping others rewrite their stories.

Perhaps God’s work was in those holy halls after all. Perhaps his grace was large enough to cover my grapplings. And perhaps his work in our work is what makes it all meaningful.

I’ll leave you with Psalm 90:17, and verse we often quote (and sing!) to commission these paths of the people:

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands.”

Photo by Marina Reich on Unsplash