Work

I bought a gift for my grandmother at one of those little shops next to churches. Attending me and helping me with my purchases was a nun. I entered and she bid me a good morning and then she pretty much left me to browse around the little store. She did not ask me what I was looking for but rather allowed me time to go around at my own leisure as she went about her business. After I picked out what I wanted she started 'ringing' up her sale. She very politely asked me questions that were not at all obtrusive. She took genuine interest in what I was doing all the while looking for a box for the item and writing up a receipt. If she had been at a department store, I might have gotten so irritated. But it was hard to feel anything other than calm when I was in that little store. She did things so slowly, so delicately as though every movement was so carefully thought of. I could not help but watch in fascination as she pulled out an inch of tape through a tape dispenser and gently attach it to the edges of the plain brown box. Four times she did it, and I just watched her as if I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Perhaps it was because I felt that she had nothing better to do than to serve me that day.

I drove my car home trying to figure out a word that best described her. And it came to me-graceful. But even as I turned the word over in my mind I knew that it wasn't right. It wasn't graceful as it was…graced. I thought that was a better word to describe it. For in that little encounter, I felt a presence of something other than the two of us in that little room. And I've seen it many times.

At school, there is a janitress who mops up the bathroom. Every time I need to use it and the floor has just been mopped, I feel a stab of guilt and walk on tiptoes as though to lessen the damage that she's going to have to clean up. But she smiles at me and assures me that it's just fine. Then she tells me that if I didn't step on the floor, she wouldn't have any floor to clean and then she wouldn't have a job. And I see her, mopping the floor very quietly and very systematically as though it was perfectly normal to clean a floor that was bound to get dirty, over and over again. She does this very patiently and it amazes me because I know if I were in her shoes I would lash out at the smallest speck.

I see it in my students, too. Sometimes. There are kids in class who are asked to perform a task and I find that they are more meticulous than I am. While I might rush through punching holes in papers, they do it so gently, so methodically-folding the paper at the end and lining it up with the arrow just as they were probably taught in elementary. Whether they realize it or not, looking at them fills me with peace. And that classroom becomes a little bit of heaven because there are 'angels' there in those few seconds in the middle of my day.

It's more than just seeing purpose in work and having passion for it, although it definitely starts from there. I see purpose and passion in my work but even then I have to slow myself down when I start to notice the haphazard way that I "go about my business." I get things done. I am efficient and I don't waste time. (Well, I try not to waste time.) But as I learn daily, I know that there is more to work than just being efficient and effective. I think that more than measuring the result of our work, it is seeing God in work. It is the belief that there is no work too menial or too ordinary that we cannot find God in it, laboring with us, side by side. It is knowing that God can be just as alive in the writing of the letter 'G' as He is in the writing of a hymn. That there can be holiness in cleaning a fish and in cleaning a tabernacle. The greatness of our actions is not measured by what we do. And perhaps not even how we do what we do. But how we do what we do reminds others of the existence of God. A "good day" on the job (or in anything else) is not when we bring home the bacon. It happens when we bring Christ to others. For comments, email me at [email protected].