This Is Significant

I’ve never understood working a job – why someone would spend his time to get money in order to afford more time. More time which he will just spend working to get more money, and so on. If he survives this for fifty years or so, maybe he can afford to retire, just as soon as he’s too old to enjoy the time or make much use of it. 

Some people are blessed to work jobs they love and are passionate about – a vocation and occupation rolled into one. But this is a very small section of the population, especially globally. Far more people spend most of their waking time working jobs they don’t like for companies they don’t care about. This is why jobs pay money – because no one would voluntarily do them otherwise. 

I wish we as humans were free to spend our time doing what we believed in and trying to put good into the world rather than trying to make enough money to survive it. But the world isn’t set up this way and jobs aren’t the only useless thing we endure. 

In his lifetime, the average person spends 26 years sleeping and 4.5 years eating. There’s also cooking, laundry, brushing teeth, and other maintenance tasks I consider a necessary waste of time. Very little is left over for the valuable things like music, reading, relationships, philosophy, and creating art. This is especially true historically when the vast majority of our time was spent tending to basic necessities like not getting eaten by a tiger. So much time is spent staying alive, very little is left over for actually living. Or so I thought.

I don’t know why we were created with a largely animal nature requiring so much maintenance – so much time doing mundane things like work and sleep. I don’t know how these things have any significance or meaning. But I have to think they do because we are told, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God,” and again, “The Lord gives sleep to His beloved.” Eating, drinking, and sleep are among the most mundane things one can do, and yet we can apparently glorify God in them. 

We were created with biological, environmental, and social limitations, and somehow these limitations do not detract from what God wants to do in and through us. He will fulfill His perfect plan, not just in spite of these things, but by using them. 

I think all this time spent staying alive, working a job, and doing laundry is a waste of time, but it isn’t. Even the most mundane thing can be an act of worship. God put each of us in a specific place and time for a purpose. I don’t get to decide what that purpose is, I may not even know what it is, and it may not look significant to me. But God will use me where He has me – at work, in the lives of family and friends, in a thousand ways I may never see. My distorted view of what is significant and what is not may actually be keeping me from seeing the extraordinary things God is doing in my ordinary life. 

I bristle at this. I don’t like the parable of George Bailey where the ordinary man is more noble than the extraordinary man he set out to be. I don’t want to settle or become an average, boring person who talks about his work or home maintenance projects. I want to be extraordinary, consumed with things I think are significant.

But it is arrogance to suggest I know what matters and what doesn’t. I need to bow the knee and recognize that my significance is not found in me doing what I want at the level I want, but in God using me where He has me. There is no wasted time. Just time He gives me to be used however He wants for purposes and significance known only to Him. 

J.

*1 Corinthians 10:31

**Psalm 127:2

Aug. 31, 2021