Three years ago I was offered my dream job, and I turned it down. This wasn’t a great noble act, turning down a powerful, lucrative position so that I could provide acts of humble service. Actually it was more like the opposite. The job I turned down was as Director of IT Strategy for World Vision International. After a long career in IT management, and a growing passion for alleviation of global poverty, and with a great appreciation for World Vision’s community development and poverty action vision, this was a match apparently “made in heaven”.
Except that apparently it wasn’t.
The job I turned it down for was with a bunch of money-grubbing real estate lenders. After so long working for a commercial bank, it was clear that God would want me to “give back” to the community – no longer in the materialistic financial world but now working for communities.
Except that apparently He didn’t.
Through a series of events and conversations, especially with my wife (much wiser than I, of course) it became apparent that, for whatever reason, God was calling me to the mortgage lender and not to the global charity. I was obedient on the outside at least, but it took me a few months for that obedience to seep through. Lesson one: our ideas of what Kingdom service looks like will frequently not match God’s ideas.
Around this time I discovered that work is God’s blessing to us. (We often misread Genesis 3:17 where God does not say that work is cursed, but that it will be hard: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.”) I had been learning more about God’s Kingdom, whose arrival Jesus announced at the beginning of his ministry (e.g. Mark 1:15). As Reformed theology likes to say: the Kingdom is already now, but not yet – it is here and we’re called to part of its development, until its ultimate fulfillment in the new heaven and earth. So I had started questioning how my work fits in this “already now” Kingdom of God.
Now it was time for God’s first lesson for me. His Kingdom is everywhere – in a mortgage lender as well as a global charity, and He was choosing to co-opt me into His plan in real estate lending. Go figure!
I would believe that as a Christian, your work will be more valued in a non-Christian environment, where people can learn from you and it can help you grow and see God's work in different ways.
ReplyDeleteIn my beta group recently, we discussed the pros and cons of working for a Christian or Charitable organisation, and although on the surface it would seem like an honourable thing to do, in reality you can make more of an influence in the lives of people who are maybe not in touch with God or his work!