A Good Endeavor – A Trip to Brookwood
Last month our team took a trip to The Brookwood Community. Their vision is to change the way the world thinks about adults with disabilities. Today they have more than 200 citizens each week engaging in meaningful and fulfilling work, with over 100 residential citizens who live on site. Their jobs may include serving in The Brookwood Café, cultivating plants, creating greeting cards, crafting ceramics, amongst other positions.
While there, our team spent a couple of hours serving in the horticulture area, but the best part was engaging with the citizens who were passionately serving in their own jobs. As we arrived, it struck me that I had never seen someone so excited to wake up and go to work. They were thrilled to have the opportunity to serve with a productive mind, heart, and hands. Each one wanted to show us the intricacies of their work and what they were able to create. Their joy burst forth with such intensity it felt infectious.
Not only was there joy, but a purity associated with their work. Their jobs are not about the pay or the prestige of each position, they are just grateful to have work. Their heart attitude hit our team in a significant way. And it was serendipitous timing that we made the trip to Brookwood because we have spent the last three months reading Tim Keller’s book, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.
Work – A Necessity for Life
In his book, Keller connects the work of human hands to God’s work amongst and within the world, claiming that honest work is not just in service to others or self, but to God. In addition, he points out how important work inherently is. This runs counter to our western “retirement culture” of working hard so that we can find enjoyment, contentment, and pleasure later, away from work.
Keller makes the claim that work is just as necessary to health and human flourishing as food and water for the body and sleep to the mind. Work is not just something we need to keep us alive; it is in and of itself a necessity for life. Removing all sense of productivity will in due time kill you. We were made to be productive and to cultivate as laid out in Genesis. Not working may not result in death as quickly as having no water to drink, but it will wear on your mind, body and spirit and lead to death. I see this vividly in my own father who is fighting Multiple Sclerosis. His body lacks the energy to work, but his mind and spirit long to find a means of productivity.
Work as an Offering
The citizens at Brookwood embodied the life that is breathed into them through their work. They see their work as an offering to God, viewing themselves as a means of God’s common grace to the world.
After serving, I walked away asking myself some important questions that felt applicable given our line of work (helping clients work towards attaining a set of goals). Usually, we try to quantify the goals we lay out and associate a certain amount of money to get there (e.g., size of retirement portfolio, new home, college for kids, etc.). However, the questions I walked away asking are a little more conceptual, but in my opinion more important:
Is work fulfilling and if not, why?
Do I view my work as good and honest and a way to serve people?
In my work am I seeking to please man or God?
Am I working hard to reach goals that will fail to provide the contentment I seek?
What are the idols I’m chasing after in and through my work? And what are the idols I’m chasing in my ideal retirement?
Our work can be a sweet offering to Christ. If given to Him and done for His glory it is spiritual and a very real component of serving man and God. Whether you are working for a paycheck or in retirement, I believe God has great work for you to do. You can be in a prison like the apostle Paul or chronically ill like my own dad, and still have great work set before you. If God has you on this earth, He has work for you to take part in and serve Him whole-heartedly through.
