It’s Bring God to Work Day!
If you add up all the time we spend at work over a lifetime, it equals about 10.3 years. Compare that to our number-one time consuming activity—sleeping, 25 years—and you realize just how much of our life is spent at the office. Wouldn’t it be great if we could feel a sense of purpose and spiritual fulfillment during those many hours?
Clocking in to our 9-5 might seem like the last place to find spiritual inspiration or connect to a higher power. Often, the day-to-day grind causes us to go on autopilot. Maybe you love your job, maybe it’s just a way to get by. Either way, your spiritual life doesn’t have to go on pause when you sit down at your desk. Here are a few ways to bring God into the workplace:
Prayer
The great thing about prayer is that you can do it anywhere! Close your eyes at your desk for five minutes before you start your day, or during a walk on your lunch break. Anywhere, anytime, God is always waiting for us to reach out. Try praying for your co workers, your boss, or that difficult project you’re working on. If there are others in the office who share a similar faith, start a prayer chain where you pray together and for each other.
Surround Yourself
Put up quotes, photos or reminders around your workspace… anything that helps you connect to your spiritual center. Our physical space can have a big impact on our emotions, and can help us connect inward and remember that we are part of something greater than ourselves, and that even though we spend many hours at the office, our job is not all of who we are. First and foremost, we are children of our Heavenly Parent.
Connect Your Work to God’s
If you work in a non-profit whose mission is to feed starving children, connecting your company’s purpose and vision to God is pretty self-explanatory. But what if you work in a paper clip factory? It might be a little harder to think of what you do as “God’s work”. Remember, God made the big majestic lions as well as the tiny beetle, and everything has its place in Creation. You may not think what you do is a big deal, but sometimes, small things can make a big difference. I bet you never knew there were so many amazing things to do with paper clips. Seriously, you don’t realize how important paper clips are until you want to make a rubber-band helicopter. The world needs paper clips, and God can’t make them; He needs YOU for that!
Think of it as Practice
The work environment is a great place to put all those lessons we learn in faith into real practice. Think about it. How many times a day, especially if you work in a team, might you have to actively remind yourself to “treat others the way you would want to be treated”, or to “see from God’s viewpoint”? It’s not in reading and studying that our faith becomes real, but in the day-to-day practice, especially our relationships with others.
Think of your coworkers as a microcosm of all of humanity. Figuring out how to get along with difficult coworkers is like learning to love our enemies. To work productively with a team to accomplish a shared goal is a foundation for learning how to create peace and solve problems on a larger scale. When we approach our jobs with the attitude of how they will help us grow and practice our faith, we become better, and so does our work environment!
So pull out an extra coffee mug and invite God to come with you to work today! He’s a real team player.