God at Work

Sometimes I have a hard time being a Christian and doing a regular job. 

I was reading the Bible a few days ago and saw this verse about Joshua that frustrated me.

“The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young assistant Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent.” (Exodus 33:11)

I read it and thought, that sounds amazing, but I have a regular job now.

I used to not.

I was a youth pastor for 12 years, then resigned to start a nonprofit. But God had other plans, and a side business I started became “the business” and now I’m in the digital marketing world. In that was also a year of severe depression, making some friends, making some enemies, and a lot of counseling.

So now I run a small business. And I still question (way more than seems necessary) if God is totally into what I’m doing.

Does God like people in business? I think so?

I mean, He’s placed me where He’s placed me, but still I have this nagging feeling that seems to grow right after church on Sundays – am I doing what God wants?

It got me thinking about artificial intelligence. I think we all made that leap in logic, right?

There’s a big debate in my industry about whether or not artificial intelligence will help people like me do a better job, or just outright take our jobs. Essentially, can you make a robot so good it can in a sense “be human”? Can you make a software program that writes advertisements so well that marketing people and writers are out of a job?

I don’t really know what the end result is gonna be, but I do know that the limitation of artificial intelligence will always be that it’s artificial. 

It isn’t human. 

It seems obvious, but the implication is huge.  

Artificial intelligence can say things that sound like a human, but in the end it doesn’t know what it is to have emotions. It will never do the job “just right”. You might not be able to put your finger on it right away, but it will feel like something’s a little off. The reason being that humans are complicated, incredibly stubborn, weird creatures.

We have emotion. In fact, we have so many emotions that the emotions I feel writing this and the emotion (or lack of) that you feel reading this will be completely different. And it will be unique to each reader as well. Meaning, everyone that interacts with this post will have a slightly different emotion.

It boils down to the fact that we are created by God with one thing that no other animal or machine will ever have: a soul.

Our soul sets us apart from not just other animals, but from everything in creation.

Which gets me thinking again about work, because there are some days when I’m at my desk and frustrated about doing a task that seems soul-less. If I do it long enough I feel less human. Less me. 

I think everyone has that kind of stuff at least once in their day.

I was doing that kind of work a few days ago and was thinking about how great it must have been for Joshua to sit in the tent of God all day long. That sounds way better than re-editing a video for the fifth time or staring at a blinking cursor on a screen.

But no matter what you do, the great thing about having a regular job is that we work with people we typically wouldn’t have met any other way. God’s put us where we are, with others who also have souls just as important to Him, and what we do with all of that matters.

It’s something I forgot a lot.

When I want to bang my head on my desk, I sometimes think, if Jesus was sitting at my exact desk doing my exact task, how would He do it?

And then the kicker: is that different than how I’m doing it currently?

It’s a really focusing question. 

It makes me look at my job differently.  

I mean at first it makes me kind of grumpy, but it starts to work on me like exercise. Not what I want in the moment, but still good for me.

Am I open to what God has put in front of me on this day?  

Being open to God is, I don’t know, it’s just better. Not in the moment, but things just seem to start working better. Maybe I start working better? I never can decide the answer on that one.

In the end, it’s not really about anything I do.

What I can “do for God” is not a requirement for His love. He doesn’t even really need what I can do. He’s got a lot of people. He’ll find someone.  

If you fall in the trap I often do, you can equate doing things, or tithing, or showing up to church every Sunday as security. God loves me this I know because I-did-all-this-stuff-for-Him-this-week!

But that’s not it.

He just needs you. 

And everything else starts from there.