Spirituality and work

How can I lead people to find the spirituality of work from the ivory tower of vocational church life?  How can my spiritual formation matter to people in the real world when I am seen as an oddity? Spirituality is my work. I am paid to pray, to study scripture and sit and think for long stretches.  How can I say anything of substance to Marv about finding Jesus in the oil and gears of the engine I barely understand?  How can I ask Jeff to find Jesus in the electricity flowing in the lines he is repairing at the sugar factory on a Sunday morning, keeping him from joining us at church?  What does my intimacy with Jesus do for the retiree struggling with meaning after putting in years of labor at the steering gear plant while I haven’t loaded my “sixteen tons?”

These are just the questions I live with in a blue-collar community. I’m not sure I would be any better equipped to minister to them if I were shackled to an industrial job – especially if I was thrown off balance and couldn’t manage to continue to explore my spiritual formation. No, a pastor is what they need, but how to make it real to them that work can be more than what we do? Spiritual direction would be a wonderful place to explore this.  Most of my working people aren’t seeking the spiritual let alone direction. Perhaps informally, doing direction with out them realizing I am – allowing my own deepening in grace to form questions and conversations that would get them thinking and looking for the presence of God at work.

What does God need?

In our ministerial group we have on occasion batted around the question: does God have real needs? Does God need us? Does God need companionship? Does God need our service?

In thinking so about God's nature the thought occurs to me that if God has a deep inner need, it is the need to reveal himself.  God's self-revelation is a gracious mystery.  We have no explanation for it.  Indeed by creating the universe and human beings to observe it, God has made a vehicle for communication of the Divine nature. God's self-revelation is also necessarily transformative.  One cannot gaze into the awful abyss of God's nature and not be changed - from glory to glory.

As a human being I am created to not only search out God's personhood but to proclaim it, to worship.  God invites me to participate in this revelation of the beauty of God's being, leading others (in the end all of creation) to transformation.  To me that is the spirituality of leadership - firmly rooted in the Boundless.