InsideWork » MeaningOfWork

Tag: MeaningOfWork

March 2007

7: An Honest Day’s Work

Michael Novak
Business as a Calling (page 15), Free Press 1996
Half of the pleasure from the business calling derives from a sense that the system of which it is a part is highly beneficial to the human race, morally sound and one of the great social achievements of all time. The other half is personal — finding purpose and meaning in what one does.

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5: Performance Standards

Martin Luther King Jr.
A speech at Philadelphia’s Barratt Junior High School (cited by the Seattle Times), October 26, 1967
If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

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Jesus & Your Job

The meaning of work and leadership principles from Nancy Ortberg

A link to a great sermon by Nancy Ortberg entitled Jesus & Your Job. She covers the meaning of work and key leadership principles.

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4: Job Satisfaction

Os Guinness
The Call (page 46), Word 1998
Work, for most of us, determines a great part of our opportunity for significance and the amount of good we are able to produce in a lifetime. Besides, work takes up so many of our waking hours that our jobs come to define us and give us our identities. We become what we do. Calling reverses such thinking. A sense of calling should precede a choice of job and career, and the main way to discover calling is along the lines of what we are each created and gifted to be. Instead of, “You are what you do,” calling says: “Do what you are.”

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February 2007

Can God Call Me to "Work", Not "Ministry"?

A Lesson from William Wilberforce

Dan Wooldridge sees a lesson in William Wilberforce that counters the error that “ministry” is the realm of “spiritual” work. Wilberforce led a legendary career in politics.

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3: Strategic Plan

Dorothy Sayers
Creed or Chaos (page 101), Sophia Institute Press 1949
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, as the medium in which he offers himself to God.

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Running Out of Time, Part 4

Leadership Lessons from the Wilderness

The last in a series by Dan Wooldridge on Psalm 90. This considers Moses' final prayer and what he is requesting that will make life meaningful.

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2: Big Picture

Doug Sherman and William Hendricks
Your Work Matters to God (p 77), NavPress 1987
Work is not something we do apart from God, as the secular worker would view it. Work is not something beneath God’s dignity or concern, as the Two–Story view believes. Nor is work a game that we play with non–Christians in order to accomplish a more important agenda, as the Mainstream advocate holds. Instead, work is a major part of human life that God takes very seriously.

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1: Startup

Dorothy L Sayers
Creed or Chaos (p 89), Sophia Institute Press 1949
(Work is to be seen) not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.

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December 2006

Innovative Engagement With Our World Through Our Work

A Roman Catholic order acquires a Pfizer biotech lab to develop cures for cancer and gains influence to push for more ethical practices in the pharmaceutical industry. Dan Wooldridge asks how we can push for positive change within our own industries.

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October 2006

Too Tired to Do More

Our work can seem like trivial toil and we wonder about whether we will do anything that will make a difference. God’s perspective on our work is measured very differently.

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Working to Change the World

One Millimeter at a Time

Dan Wooldridge notes that all of our work should be crafted to aim high and strive to change the world, a little bit at a time.

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Choruses from The Rock

Work-Life Insights from T.S. Eliot

Dan Wooldridge notes that T.S. Eliot in his Choruses from The Rock though written in 1934 still peels back the veneer of modern business and work life to expose its emptiness.

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