Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

How do we find God in our work? How do we allow our work to move us toward the person God wants us to be? Jesus must have valued work for he spent more than ¾ of his life as a carpenter.
God has placed His desires in us for the calling He has for each of us and that will bless others.  When we are working, the joy and power we feel is the presence of His Spirit.  We were born with strengths and when we discover them we can put them to use and focus on developing them. There are certain activities that thrill and challenge us, and others that bore and drain us. When we discover our strengths, we are learning what an indispensible part of what it means to be made in the image of God. Dorothy Sayers said, “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”

The best moments of our lives don’t come from leisure or pleasure, but from being immersed in a significant task that is challenging and matched up with our abilities.  It is like we are in a flow and being swept up by something outside ourselves. Should we complain when we are about to do that for which we were born and placed on earth? May we see our work as a form of love and connect with the One who in turn uses the flow to shape us.