Vacation @ Work – Camping

Just two work days to vacation – I can’t wait. I need this break so badly. But why? Aren’t vacations a modern invention? Not according to the Bible.

The stress level lately has been so high that even 11 hours on a plane to London is amazingly attractive. But part of me feels like if I was “giving everything to God”, if I was fully experiencing His peace, then I wouldn’t need a break so badly. However, since I’m no paragon of virtue, vacation is very much a necessity.

As it turns out, this is quite biblical. I was recently researching the Jewish feast of Succot, known as the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles. (This was for a sermon on Nehemiah 8 and John 7, both of which occur around this festival). It lasts 8 days, starts and ends with a party, and in the middle everybody goes camping. Seriously! Take a look at the instructions in Leviticus 23: “Celebrate this as a festival to the LORD for seven days each year. This is to be a lasting ordinance for the generations to come; celebrate it in the seventh month. Live in booths for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in booths so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in booths when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (v 41-43). This vacation is a time to refocus on God’s gracious provision for us, a time to get our perspective back – our Sovereign God is in control and will provide for our needs as we fit into His plan. The Jews were to live out the memory of their wandering in the wilderness when they were absolutely dependent on God, but He came through with everything they needed.

We need a break from our daily work for several reasons. For some of us, the work environment is very stressful due to business conditions, or difficult boss or co-worker, or a sense of being out of our depth. For some it is very tedious and mind-numbing. For some it is physically exhausting and for other mentally exhausting. In all these cases we need a break, a rest – a time for our bodies and minds to heal and to be rejuvenated. In our vacations we should be seeking re-creation – renewal of minds, bodies and spirits.

But just as much we need to be restored spiritually. No matter how hard we try it seems as though work concerns swamp our relationship with God, and vacation allows us to step back from it and put God firmly back in the center of our lives. There is time to reflect, to rebuild relationships with Him and with friends and family. There is time to simply enjoy Him and His creation.

Some people don’t take their vacations, and think they’re heroes. I am not supportive of this attitude in my staff – I strongly encourage them to take decent vacations and not to carry over a whole lot, because I haven’t met anyway who couldn’t benefit from a good vacation. How the vacation is spent will of course impact its value – but I can’t influence that.

As for me, I’m off to England in autumn – camping of course – not!

Love @ Work Always Protects

There’s nothing better than a juicy piece of gossip at the water cooler is there? Except, of course, when it’s about you. Then harmless gossip suddenly looks like hateful slander.

The NIV translation of the first part of 1 Corinthians 13:7 says that love “always protects”. The King James and many derivative translations have “bears all things”. Apparently the original Greek word stegei actually means “covers” – it is derived from a root word meaning “roof”. There are a few ways in which love covers all things. God has shown us what this looks like with His own example toward us.

1. Love holds secret those things that would have a negative impact on others, unless it is essential for some reason to share them with someone else. Love does not gossip. Period! God’s example: He covers all of our faults, failings and sins because of His grace. In other words He forgives us so thoroughly that He acts as though we had not sinned (even though the consequences of our sins will generally still get played out).
2. Even deeper, there is an allusion to the Hebrew concept of covering as a form of redemption. Love will carry the burden (hence “bears all things”) and will protect others from the implications of their actions (“always protects”). This appears in the idea of the kinsman-redeemer (Leviticus 25:25) which is better known in the story of Ruth (4:1), who provides a cover for Ruth by purchasing her from poverty and loneliness to be his wife (and a direct ancestor of the Messiah Jesus!). God’s example: He provides a Redeemer – one who will take the most serious consequence of our sin, which is eternal separation from God, and buy us out of it.
3. The word is also used with the sense or bearing with, or forbearing (e.g. 1 Thessalonians 3:1,5). God’s example: it is obvious that God is constantly bearing with us – our rebellions, our tantrums, our stubborn pride. We’d need to be pretty self-delusional to deny this!

When we see wrong in another at work, whether directed at us or not, we have a responsibility as bearers of God’s image, and as those redeemed by Jesus, to behave in the same counter-intuitive ways:

1. We will not gossip about other employees, whether we’re sure of the facts or not. We will in fact restrict our communications to those that are strictly essential to the good of the employee and the company. This isn’t always an easy judgment, but it is much narrower than most people’s practice would imply.
2. We will forgive and in that sense cover over wrongs done to us, on the grounds that we have been forgiven far, far more by the gracious God who made us. (See e.g. the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:23-35).
3. We will bear with the ongoing faults of others, just as we need God (and actually other people) to bear with ours. Oh boy this is hard isn’t it? How hard must it be for God to love us though – surely in response it makes sense for us to seek through the Holy Spirit in us to move in the direction of doing the same?

Justice @ Work – Rationalizing

What is the biggest challenge to justice in the workplace? Is it greed? Or selfishness? Or hunger for power? Much less obvious, but insidious and almost universal is rationalization. I suffer from it – so probably do you.

Raymond Chandler says “However toplofty and idealistic a man may be, he can always rationalize his right to earn money.” How true! Rationalizing is a technique we use to convince ourselves that some action or outcome that we might otherwise find morally questionable is in fact OK. For example a person evades paying taxes and then rationalizes it by talking about how the government wastes money (and how it is better for people to keep what they can). Or I excuse the difference between what I earn and what our receptionist earns by any one of a number of things:

• We’re in a capitalist society in which prices (including labor) are driven by supply and demand
• The company would be impacting far more by my leaving than hers
• She’s become accustomed to living on much less than me
• And so on

I’m not sure why I started writing this, because it is really uncomfortable. There is no Biblical mandate that requires financial equity – that is that requires everyone to own or possess the same amounts. What we are given is entrusted to us by God to be used for Him anyway.

My point here is that we can find an excuse for any action whatever if we want to. So how do we catch ourselves from going down what my boss calls “the slippery slope”. I am fortunate in having a boss who is very ethical (almost to a fault in that he pushes an ethical point so far in favor of one group that it damages another group – it is often a zero-sum game). Given the extreme financial challenges we’re facing – he as owner and I as his operations executive – we have plenty of scope for going down a path that is expedient but not ethical, that skirts the law, or that benefits one party at the expense of another.

There are rarely straightforward answers. He is open to my perspective on Biblical justice (though doesn’t necessarily agree) – but that’s not always clear-cut either. What we do have is a willingness to challenge each other, pointing out the beginning of the “slippery slope” and pulling one another back. I’m very blessed. So my recommendation is that, whatever your work situation, you try to find someone with whom you can talk through business decisions, large or small, to challenge you and hold you accountable to stop rationalizing.

The other approach is always to seek to see situations through God’s eyes. This sounds impossible, but to a degree I’m convinced it is not. “Pray continually” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) means keeping our communication channels with God open in everything at all times. Combined with daily, in-depth, Bible reading and study we can truly see God’s perspective to the extent our limitations allow. And God does not rationalize!

Love @ Work Rejoices with the Truth

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32).
“There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.” (Agnes Repplier).
Discuss.

The Truth is a tricky beast. Yes I know I’m supposed to love it, but there are times when (a) I’d rather not know, or (b) I’d rather nobody else knew. Whether it’s truth about me or you, both apply.

Of course Jesus was talking about a different kind of Truth wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? Well at least it was Truth about God, about life, and about reality. His Truth goes so much deeper than factual stuff. But it is hard to deny that the factual stuff is a part of Truth.

OK so let’s explore this idea that “love … rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). First it is in opposition to last week’s phrase “love does not delight in evil”. In a sense it is like one of those proverbs that uses poetic parallelism to give a positive and a negative way of saying the same thing, like “A wise son brings joy to his father, but a foolish son grief to his mother” (Proverbs 10:1). It emphasizes the point, just as our present clause does.

We should expect, therefore, that this is the flip side of the coin from not delighting in evil, and so I believe it proves to be. Not only do we not have little internal parties when our rival falls flat on his or her face, but we DO have such a party when our rival has pulls off something that improves their position. OK it was hard enough damping down our enthusiasm for the other person’s failure, but surely we don’t need to get all pumped up because they did something well do we? Or do we? Well of course we know the answer.

I don’t know about you, but I often draw the line when their success impacts me negatively. It would be like a soccer team all jumping for joy when the other team scores on them! I mean, come on – have you ever seen that?

The other aspect of this is in our truth-telling. I’m not sure about “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (I have some sympathy for the “naked truth” quote at the beginning) but truth without embroidery, exaggeration, or avoidance. There are times the truth, particularly about someone else, is unnecessary. If it is necessary there are ways to tell it – compassionate, confidential and constructive would be good words to apply. Without these, the truth easily becomes the “evil” of the previous phrase.

Underlying all these, though, is Jesus quote – “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”. His Truth shows us the reality of who we and others are, how much we are valued and loved, how rich are God’s plans for us (both together and individually), and just Who is really in charge. Now that is truly Truth we can rejoice in, Truth that transforms every action, word and even thought in the workplace.

Justice @ Work – Restoration

I had dinner at an amazing restaurant in Charlotte, NC on Saturday. The King’s Kitchen employs solely the “unemployable” and devotes all its profits to feeding the poor in Charlotte. The employees are typically people trying to reenter the workforce after prison, or addiction recoveries or other major problems, or else at-risk youth. It was opened by a local master chef (Jim Noble) earlier this year and is an amazing picture of the merging of gifts, talents and resources for God’s Kingdom. Appropriately it is a “Soul Food” restaurant – providing far more for the soul than the eponymous Southern cuisine. See http://www.kingskitchen.org/ for more information and, if you’re ever in Charlotte, visit – you’ll find that the service in particular is quite outstanding!

Chef Noble was determined to combine his great culinary and restaurant management skills with his passion for justice. Unfortunately I just missed the opportunity to meet him – a broadcaster friend had interviewed him and been blown away by his faith-driven passion for the marginalized in society.

It raises for me a really significant question of justice in the workplace – that of restoring those who have in some way failed in their duties to society. Our faith is all about restoration isn’t it? Without God’s mercy and grace we wouldn’t have a chance. Paul’s letter to the Romans is particularly clear on this point, but really it is one of the key messages of the whole of Scripture. Who are we, then, to deny restoration to those who have failed in the workplace?

It isn’t always that simple though. How do we balance business risks against grace? If someone has failed in the past, aren’t we risking our company’s money by giving them another chance? I recently supported the hiring of an attorney who had been suspended by the state bar association, had gone through all his required rehabilitation steps, and was trying to reenter the legal profession. Unfortunately, he isn’t performing well at all. There was a risk that doesn’t seem to be paying off – does that make my decision wrong?

In a more general sense, we face this challenge all the time. In a way it is related to the question of forgiveness, which I’ve written about elsewhere (http://faithatworkplace.blogspot.com/2010/08/love-work-keeps-no-record-of-wrongs.html). We face the same tension of our business responsibilities and our desire to show love to the individual. As managers we have a responsibility to our employers, our employees and ourselves to do everything we can to coach through challenges, to address performance issues and to overcome weaknesses before we give up on someone. As colleagues, peer coaching is equally important (and often terribly underestimated in value).

Bottom line – nobody, thank God, is beyond redemption. But redemption may involve a change of job or responsibilities. For those staff at The King’s Kitchen, who are doing such an amazing job, restoration means a completely new career, a new way of living. For us as managers and colleagues, the same may need to be proposed and made to happen. Even if we are forced to part ways with an employee because there is no alternative in our company for them, the approach must be one of helping them to see and seek true restoration in a different environment. In our loving actions and prayers, may we be able to help!

Love @ Work Does Not Delight in Evil

Do you get a secret thrill when your business gets one over on a competitor? Or, closer to home, when a rival for a promotion makes a big mistake? Come on, be honest!

Our natural self-centered first reaction is to rejoice when something goes wrong for someone we view in some way as a competitor or, as 1 Corinthians 13:6 puts it, “delight in evil”. In this context, we’re talking about something going wrong for someone else. Of course things do go wrong for other people. Of course we are entitled to do what we can (ethically and morally) to accomplish business and personal goals. But our attitude toward our opponent is to be one of love, not hate. When Jesus says (John 6:35) “love your enemies, do good to them”, I don’t think this just means people who are actively attacking us. Even more it means the people who are in our way, or who don’t like us (or we don’t like).

We can get quite conflicted can’t we? When someone else wins the promotion, we wish something had happened to slow them down. Conversely when something does happen to someone else, we rationalize our celebration by thinking that they obviously didn’t deserve it, we are clearly better than them, or they’re better off as they are. Where is our compassion? Where is our love?

This can be a factor for managers too – one of the toughest parts of management is dealing with difficult or poorly performing employees. How often have we wished something would happen that would cause such people to resign, or have to leave, or else would give us clear grounds for dismissal? I inherited an employee many years ago, an experienced programmer who had all sorts of bad reports against him from various people. My job was to go through a process to terminate him. So I started with him, of course, and let him talk about what was going on. Then I started to listen to what other people had to say, and it began to dawn on me that there was more to this than met the eye. Fortunately, before I went through the disciplinary process I realized that this was a very talented man with some communication challenges, who had received no support whatever from a manager who was in fact “delighting in evil” – grabbing onto the bad reports he’d received as ammunition to get rid of what he saw as a difficult employee. This programmer became my star performer, my number one ranked team member. He also went from being morose and dissatisfied with work and life in general to a cheerful and actively contributing member of the team. I’ve experienced this scenario several times during my career and can attest to the joy of reversing the situation and discovering and unleashing the potential in discarded employees. It doesn’t always work out that way of course, but we are bound to try.

As so often, this comes back to how we view our colleagues as unique, valuable, gifted individuals, loved to the extreme by God. When we see people that way, even if we can’t resist some jealousy if they succeed ahead of us, we will not rejoice in evil. We will instead be concerned and compassionate, and will seek justice on their behalf if necessary. In fact, if they deserve a promotion ahead of us (and we often know it) we will speak out on their behalf. When was the last time you did that?

Church @ Work – Teaching

I suspect that Jesus’ disciples, especially the Twelve, started to look like him, walk like him and talk like him. Not always. But enough that they could be picked out in a crowd.

That’s the impact of a special kind of teaching called discipling. In the old Jewish Rabbi-disciple model (like similar models in several cultures) the goal of a disciple was to become just like his/her master/mistress. (Sadly these were mostly male but the model clearly supports female teachers and adherents). Rabbi means teacher. Disciple means learner, but in a very intense way.

How do we learn to be natural, consistent and transformational as Christians at work? When we’re surrounded all day by people who don’t necessarily believe as we do, where priorities are far from being Kingdom priorities, and where values are distinctly worldly, it is hard to be a disciple. Yes, we have the Bible, and prayer, and perhaps a small group with other people where work sometimes comes up as a subject. But to look, walk, talk and act like Jesus we need far more than that.

Isn’t this where the church comes in? There we are in fact surrounded by people who, at least in principle, also share Jesus’ values and priorities, or at least want to. In the early church, Christians learned about these things at least as much from one another as from their private devotions. This wasn’t always easy - just look at the conflicts between the early leaders (e.g. Paul and Peter, Paul and Barnabus), and the descriptions of church conflicts in 1 Corinthians and other letters. The church is designed to be a crucible, where faith is tested and refined. It is designed to be a place where the members of the Body of Christ come together in dependence on one another and on the Head of the Body, to worship, to grow, and to serve.

Teaching takes many forms in this context. It occurs in the classroom, where we can have in-depth discussions of the things in daily life that we are really called to struggle with. Those of us who teach in this formal way have a wonderful opportunity to present a basis for workplace faith, to work through real issues, and to help one another grapple with specific problems. Teaching also occurs in one-on-one contexts, as we become used to sharing one another’s burdens, most of which occur in daily life and many of them in the workplace. In some context or another, we are all teachers.

Teaching also starts very young – typically with preschoolers and kindergartners. Hopefully we’re not quite ready to send them out to work. But this is where the foundations are laid – the idea of God’s unique purpose in creating each one of us, the beginnings of awareness of His Kingdom and His role for us in it. That continues through elementary, middle and high school with increasing awareness of calling, challenges and the like.

In all our teaching, let’s be inclusive of the whole of life, and especially the way we are spending the bulk of our days – at work, or school, or other calling. Let’s share with one another what it means to be called by God to this, to be privileged to be part of His Kingdom purpose. Let’s share one another’s burdens as we talk through real daily issues. Let’s help one another as disciples of the Master to increasingly look and act like him at work.