Manna

Mondays are pretty typical here. I feel tired, I wake up late and I rush off to work, with a bit of a rushed- frustrated outlook on the day. Usually I write off Mondays as days just to get through, and I’ve realized that there’s room for an attitude adjustment. At least there’s room for a perspective shift.

Today felt like nothing happened. Things happened, but they didn’t really seem to be worth all that much. So, that was frustrating. Writing off Monday as a day to survive seems to help me be okay when nothing really happens, but even that practice seems to be a bit sad.

I had a really good conversation with Mikey about work. It’s been such a strange journey. There are a lot of arguments about work: what it is, it’s worth, hopes, dreams, and attitudes towards it. We both agreed that very few people seem to enjoy what they do. A small percentage of people enjoy it, but it seems like that ideal is relegated to: 1. really rich people (who don’t really need to work) , 2. really lucky people, 3. really really talented people (artists, super-smart people, musicians), 4. people who work their booties off for a long long time. Granted, there’s probably a lot of leeway to that list of reasoning, but it seems to follow that trend.

There’s also another side to things. Unless if you’re crazy rich, everyone needs to work to provide for themselves or their families. So basically, everyone needs to work or have someone work for them. That’s a fact. Work spans from the hardest low paying jobs ( often time when people have few choices or options ) to jobs that fit our passions and pay us well (i think this is the dream). I think we fall in the 2 percent of the world that has choices, and opportunities for work. The rest of the 98 percent have to do whatever it takes to survive and provide for themselves or their families. Even so, we still have longings to have work that is life giving , and helps us flourish by the gifts and talents that we’ve been given from God.

We approach our work with humility, knowing that we could be working harder for less, as most of the world does. We hope this humility leads to gratitude; an attitude of thankfulness that we have enough and more. At the same time, we long for work that is aligned with our passions, talents, and hopes for the world we live in. In short, we hope to approach our work with gratitude, but to also be tempered by a longing for our gifts and talents to be used, grown, and thriving. Maybe our work is a modern story of Manna. God will and does provide for us, but we need to approach this with humility: not to hoard it, or be ungrateful, but still to long for a place where we settle and enjoy the fruits of a promised land.

The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

- Frederick Buechner