You’ve finally done it. Perhaps you’ve recently graduated college. If you’re in the humanities (like I was), you’ve been asked, “What’re you going to do with that degree?” at least six hundred times. And you say the same thing you said the first time that question caught you off guard: “Uhhh.” But you don’t need a college degree in the humanities (or in anything) to have been asked, “What are your plans now?” and, frankly, not know.
Whether you have a clear sense of direction about your future plans or not, you feel the pressure to “shape up” and sprint at full speed toward the clearly defined and obviously accomplishable goal(s) that everyone says you should have. You should also maintain a pretty steady level of contentment and not get terribly burned out or depressed or anxious or desperate. And, in the off-chance that you do, just get a good night’s sleep and wake up as chipper as you were the day before. Remember to eat your kale and run 10 miles a day so that you’re radiantly beautiful and irresistibly attractive. Right? You innovative problem-solver, you.
Most of us don’t exist as super-human, emotionless productivity machines; and those of us who do are usually frightfully overwhelmed. Still, some of us spend most of our time fighting back a paralyzing fear about the future to get much done after brushing our teeth in the morning.
Whether you’re anxiously checking off 28 items on your to-do list each day, or sitting in bed reading this on your smartphone because you’re not sure how to get started today, you’ve likely asked yourself the question to which Ecclesiastes 2:22 gives voice: “What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun?” What an honest and reflective question.
In our achievement-driven culture, where our self-worth is defined by our productivity, we end up existing in perpetual, anxious dissatisfaction whether we’re accomplishing a lot or a little. Are our efforts anything more than anxious striving in the end? Can there be a striving that isn’t anxious?
The Christian perspective offers a radically ennobling view of this concept of striving or working. At the inception of the world, the Bible says that God was a worker. In Genesis 2, God digs his hands into the soil and fashions humanity – God gets his hands dirty – not to mention all that business of creating the universe ex nihilo. God saw that his work was good, and invited humanity into the satisfaction of mirroring his character by cultivating the earth for its benefit. It isn’t until Genesis 3 that we see where satisfying, connected-to-God work went awry.
When humanity turned from God’s good prescription for life and flourishing, the state of things went from flourishing to decaying. Work became a burden, anxious striving, apart from the God-blessed mandate to cultivate and create for the good of the world.
Our experience of work is often the same. We anxiously strive to meet deadlines, turn in papers, set goals for the future, and balance a budget. We strive to be satisfied people, have meaningful relationships, and “give back” when we can. These are good things, but when we embark on them in anxious self-sufficiency and exclusively for our social, economic, or emotional betterment, we perpetuate the curse of Genesis 3. How could we not? We don’t naturally know another way. And the internal hints that flash before our consciences from time to time – the impulses to serve others and to think of ourselves secondarily – are often ignored because we don’t know how proceed with them in lifestyle-shaping ways. New York Times writer David Brooks calls this the human pattern of valuing our resumevirtues over our eulogy virtues.
This anxious striving gets us asking questions like, “What do people get for all the toil with which they labor under the sun?” But make no mistake about it – we were made for striving, for working; work was meant to be life-giving. But turning inward and away from God’s good design resulted in both anxiety and meaninglessness.
How do we begin to make the shift from anxiousstriving to striving as God intended it? The remedy is both simple and, in some sense, complex. The remedy is easy enough to name and comprehend, but complex and difficult to maintain in practice.
I’ll suggest two shifts: 1) we turn and see that all our striving is in the good and powerful hands of a God who loves us and is for our flourishing. And 2) we turn to others with a restored perspective of work that is not primarily for ourselves but for the common good.
The Turn to God
We turn to God because we see that God turned to us to demonstrate his love for us, even after our Genesis 3 fiasco. In Jesus Christ, God turned to us to accomplish a work that was for the world’s common good – redemption. Jesus Christ’s striving on the cross was for our sake, and if any one of us were there watching, we’d have likely lamented the apparent meaninglessness of such a death. But we would’ve been awfully mistaken.
The turn to God happens when we see God’s sacrificial striving for our sake. In the senselessness of the cross, God was working out our salvation, and doing so in order that we might be rightfully oriented toward him. Being rightfully oriented toward God faces us out toward our neighbors, out toward our world. Since God’s restorative work on our behalf gives us life, we, through God’s strength and in a posture of trust in God, can begin to see our work as restorative and life-giving.
The Turn to Others
Jesus in John 20 tells his disciples that he sends them into the world like the Father has sent him into the world. Paul in Romans 12 calls us to renew our minds to this reality; we are sent as flawed but redeemed people into our workplaces and families, schools and communities, to labor in love for the world’s good. Author and philosopher Dallas Willard says, “Work [is] a fundamental structure of love in the Kingdom of God.” What would happen in our communities and workplaces if we took jobs in order serve people with our talents, in the strength God has given and on the mission in which God has placed us? What if we dealt honestly with people, worked harder, forgave often, took responsibility regularly, and invited people into our lives with radical openness and warmth? Postures of hospitality and generosity become our modus operandi as the truth of God’s sacrificial striving for us takes deeper root in our lives.
As Christians living in the new reality of God’s grace and redemption, we’ve been tasked with the privilege of bearing witness to the explosive good news that God, in Jesus, is for the world and its work. As God’s Spirit continues to give us eyes to envision his renewing purposes in our relationships and professional lives, we can be sure that our striving is not purposeless. We can be encouraged that, whether we seem to have it all together or not, God’s redemptive striving for our sake and subsequent calling on our lives sweeps us up into a grander narrative, endowing our existence with an ennobling mission to see the world and our work restored.
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