Work When You Don’t Want To

There is a little saying about people who love their work, they’ve, “never worked a day in their life” because they love what they do. It’s never a burden in this imaginary situation. But that’s just impossible. The problem with the modern message about work (which is often really closely linked to purpose) is you have to find it a joy all the time. Only stay in your job as long as you like it. Work should be fun and you should be motivated to work as much as possible because it’s just a blast.

This message has the potential to ironically make work more burdensome for you. And if we are thinking about the principles of work from a few posts ago, we will remember that work and productivity are not simply self-centred pursuits. We can and should be other-person-centred as Christians.

But to push back at the modern message about work, you don’t have to be continually motivated or enjoying work to be a good worker, to be a productive person, to be a professional of sorts.

Obviously, you can’t just work when you feel like it. You have to work even when you don’t like it, and you have to work well. The best workers deliver results regardless of how they feel.

Again, this is where a Christian foundation for work can be helpful to us. Our ultimate motivation is not a motivation driven by the self. The Christian is motivated because of God, and because of one’s neighbour. These motivations are there regardless of our feelings. In fact, we ought to be striving to get our feelings in line with these motivations.

Nevertheless, we clearly ought to enjoy our work. But what I’m suggesting is we will enjoy our work more, if we were not working merely for ourselves, but working as for the Lord, and working for the love of our neighbour (that is, all people). There is more enjoyment in working with this mindset than the modern self-driven mindset.

The Christian then has good grounds to joyfully do difficult tasks. There will be many things in life you are going to have to do which are things you won’t want to do at first or won’t naturally come to you. These tasks won’t please you by their nature. But not everything is about you and me. The Christian ought to have more ground than anyone else to look beyond themselves and joyfully embrace difficult tasks. To work when we don’t want to.

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Perman, M. (2018). How to get unstuck: Breaking free from barriers to your productivity. Zondervan. 119-127