My Work Matters

Monday morning, depending on your schedule, somewhere between 5am and 8am, your alarm will go off and you realise it’s the first day of another working week.

How do you feel at that point?

• Are you happy at work?
• Are you fulfilled at work?
• Do you feel that your work has meaning?
• Do have feel a sense of achievement at work?

Or Is work just a way to get enough money to pay the bills?

In the middle of the work week, how do you feel? Do you think “I would so rather be fishing right now, than putting up with this pressure.. in fact I’d rather be having teeth extracted than being at work right now.”

Or maybe this: “If he brings up my mistake one more time, I’m walking out the door”

Often good day at work = good night at home. Bad day at work = kicking the cat, yelling at the kids and burning the dinner.

Some people struggle with the whole point of work at all and would rather be hippies growing all their own food!

How does all of that fit in with our Christian walk?

Last Sunday, Westlife kicked off a important new series called, "My Work Matters".

Rick Warren says, “Many Christians don't make the connection between Sunday and Monday. They compartmentalize their life. They think, "Well, I've got a spiritual life and I've got a secular life. My spiritual life is when I read the Bible, when I pray, when I go to church, when I do good things for others. That's my spiritual life." And that's over in one compartment.

So then, they think, over in another compartment: "This is my secular life. That's my work, my job, my career, my business decisions, my finances, my pension plan; all these things are my secular life."

Rick says that God never wanted us to keep these two parts of our life separate. He is as interested in our work life as He is in our prayer life.

This new "My Work Matters" series seeks to help people make that connection between Sunday and Monday by putting our workplaces under the microscope. The series explores how to apply what the Bible says about work in our lives: It looks at how we stay motivated at work; How we deal with difficult people; How we deal with requests that cut across our own value system.

My next few blog posts will look at the first week of the new series - leadership in the workplace.