From our early beginnings, it was clear that we human beings were created to love God and to work the “garden” in which we’ve been placed. Loving God and doing work were always designed to go together. As we love God, we are inspired to represent him with our best work. As we work, we accomplish things that cultivate God’s goodness in the world we affect. All work was meant to be sacred expression of love for God and for the things he placed under our care.
Since those early days when God declared both people and their work “very good,” we’ve taken our world on a painful detour from the ideal plan God had for it. One of the things that is badly fractured is the way we view the relationship between our work and our love for God. For most of us, the two have become separate pursuits. Learning and expressing love for God are reserved for our church and personal lives. Our everyday work is just what we do to get by or to get ahead in the world. While most of us spend our workdays relating to people, providing services and expending useful efforts within the fabric of our communities, that work is generally seen as unrelated to loving God. It is considered secular and is rarely recognized as vital to the mission God gave us in our world. The separation of these pursuits – loving God and doing work – has weakened our capacity to do either and has damaged our ability to cultivate God’s goodness within our culture and communities.