The Healing of Work
Over the past five months, we’ve been working through a series called The Work of Healing. Today, I want to close it by writing about the healing of work.
Work itself is often sick and broken. Our experience of it is riddled with overwhelming burdens, dehumanizing systems, and unjust practices. Is there any reason to suppose that it can be healed? And if so, what would it take?
[Thanks for reading. This post concludes our series The Work of Healing. Check out our other posts on faith and work and emotional health for more resources on living an integrated Christian life. Subscribe to get the next post in the series in your inbox.]
The Stats: Overwhelmed at Work
Although we can all speak to our own anecdotal experiences of when work feels like it’s working against us, taking a look at some hard, cold research is always helpful.
The VOCA Center in New York City recently commissioned an interview-based study with over 1500 participants looking at their experience of work. When workers were asked “what has been the most challenging for you in your work this year,” the most common answer was feeling overwhelmed.
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A follow-up question asked, “What factors contribute most to your feelings of stress or being overwhelmed?” Workers cited excessive workload most often.
In other words, people are overwhelmed at work . . . by the work itself.
For me, this is an intuitive research finding. When I think back to the most stressful times in my career, the workload itself was always a contributing factor. I recall nights as an ambitious twentysomething when I would stay at the office until 10pm to finish time-sensitive projects. I had a supportive boss and fantastic coworkers, but the bulk of what “just needed to get done” sometimes tipped me over the edge.
Once at a job I held at a large church, I prepped dozens of paper print-outs for our services: Sign-in sheets for volunteers, schedules, policy reminders, emergency contact information, and the like. For our Holy Week services, I organized these packets into cardboard boxes based on the upcoming service (one box for Palm Sunday, one for Maundy Thursday, one for Good Friday, etc.). About a week before Holy Week, the stack of boxes was about four feet high in my cubicle. I put a sign on it: “Do not move these boxes or Chris will cry.”
The research suggests I’m not the only one whose workload has, at times, put them on the verge of tears.
Work that Dehumanizes
The recent explosion of AI content has brought the question of humanness in work center-stage again in our cultural conversation. One reaction to the abundance of AI-generated slop has gone viral : “AI made me believe in a human soul by showing me what art looks like without it.”
As what machines can do advances, we wonder what humans can uniquely do that machines can’t. What happens when we treat a machine like a human artist, writer, teacher, or even apologist ?
But there’s a mirror-image question that also deserves to be asked: What happens when we treat a human being like a machine?
A different technological turning point fueled this question: The Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass production. In the early twentieth century, a management theorist named Frederick Winslow Taylor promulgated “scientific management,” a system in which managers empirically determined the most efficient methods for work tasks and then carefully trained laborers to follow those methods without deviation.
In other words, Taylor taught managers to treat laborers like machines. Peter Drucker, the management luminary of the late twentieth century, astutely explains the shortcomings of this approach (as quoted by Lee Hardy ):
Machines work best if they do only one task, if they do it repetitively, and if they do the simplest possible task . . . the human being is engineered quite differently. For any one task and any one operation the human being is ill-suited. He lacks strength. He lacks stamina. He gets fatigued. Altogether he is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels, however, in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind is engaged by the work.
Not only are human beings bad machines; treating them like machines is bad for work outcomes. As philosopher Lee Hardy contends: “What appears on paper to be the most efficient way to run business may not be the most effective, once human beings are plugged into the formulas. ‘Efficiency’ can be terribly inefficient.” Just one example: If your working conditions are so inhumane that you face consistent high turnover , you’re pouring money down the drain.
Hardy assesses the effect of this approach on the humans themselves, too:
The typically human components of work—intelligence, imaginative problem solving, informed decision-making, personal achievement—have been systematically deleted. In the Taylor-made job, human beings work like well-trained animals, or well-greased machines, but not as human beings.
When we treat humans like machines, we dehumanize them. It’s bad for their work, and bad for them.
Unjust Work
An overwhelmed worker may still get compensated fairly for the work that stresses them out. Similarly, someone whose task on the factory line is dehumanizing in its monotony may still be in a far better position than someone with no way to participate in the economy at all. But many workers worldwide are subjected to working conditions that can only be described as unjust.
The most extreme contemporary example of unjust labor is modern-day slavery. According to the UN’s International Labour Organization, about fifty million people are held in either forced labor or forced marriages. Looking at this number as a fraction of the 3.5 billion people ?that the World Bank estimates in the global workforce (or even as an addition to it, as unpaid workers are often excluded from labor statistics), more than one out of every one hundred workers in the world is enslaved, many of them children.
Subtler injustices propagate themselves across nations and industries. Whether it’s wages never paid to U.S. agricultural laborers, sexual assault of domestic workers in Hong Kong, or religious discrimination against Muslim job-seekers in France, “the grasp of the unjust and cruel” is closed tight on workers the world over (Psalm 71:4 NRSVue).
A Common Thread
At first blush, it might not seem like workers who face these diverse kinds of broken systems have much in common. Does my pre-Holy Week stress really compare with the lot of a line worker in any one of my city’s many manufacturing plants ? Does that worker’s experience in turn even hold a candle to the indignities faced by a girl forced to be a child bride in the Taliban’s Afghanistan?
Work-related suffering is not doled out in even portions. But there is a common thread that unites these diverse work stories, whether they involve simple frustration or profound abuse: Work is sick. Work is broken.
There’s something inside us that knows that work shouldn’t be the way it often is. We see it on days when work goes well: When the team pulls together, when the project succeeds, when our efforts pay off. There may even be moments when we feel like we’re doing exactly the right thing for us in our work, moments when we can say “I was born for this.”
Even those who are trapped in dire work situations may still catch glimpses of the way work could be. In his autobiography Twelve Years a Slave , Solomon Northrup writes of the understanding of free work held by those who had never known it in the antebellum South:
It is a mistaken opinion that prevails in some quarters, that the slave . . . does not comprehend the idea of freedom. Even on Bayou B?uf, where I conceive slavery exists in its most abject and cruel form—where it exhibits features altogether unknown in more northern States—the most ignorant of them generally know full well its meaning. They understand the privileges and exemptions that belong to it—that it would bestow upon them the fruits of their own labors, and that it would secure to them the enjoyment of domestic happiness.
Even those who have only known the most broken form of work can imagine something else. We can all imagine something better when we allow ourselves to do so. What would work be like if it wasn’t broken like it is? What would it be like if our work could be healed?
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A Chapter that Fits the Story
In God in the Dock , a wonderful collection of his essays and interviews, C.S. Lewis writes about how one might respond if a missing chapter of a well-known story was discovered:
The only thing you could do would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in . . . and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings from the whole of the rest of the work, if it made you notice things in the rest of the work which you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic. On the other hand, if it failed to do that, then, however attractive it was in itself, you would reject it.
This approach can be taken to the Bible’s story about work . From our own experience, we all can see that work is often sick and broken. We also feel a longing that work could and should be better. That’s the story we know. Then we come across what the Bible says about work: the missing chapters, so to speak.
The story of Genesis tells us that work is created good. God himself is the first worker, laboring in the creation of the world and then resting on the seventh day. The first thing that God gives to Adam (representing humanity) is a job: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15 NIV).
But Genesis also tells us that work has been fundamentally compromised. It is warped because of the spiritual darkness that the Bible calls “sin.” When God confronts humanity about this darkness, he says to Adam:
Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. Genesis 3:17-19 NIV
The writers of Scripture are not naive about what work feels like. Our efforts amount to “painful toil.” The circumstances of work wring the sweat from our brow. We put food on the table and get things done in the world at the cost of anxiety, uncertainty, and care.
That phrase “thorns and thistles” functions as a metaphor for all the difficulties and frustrations we face throughout our working life. There’s both an external dimension and an internal dimension to those thorns.
Externally, there are realities beyond our control, in our environment, that get in the way of us getting work done the way we want to—accidents, disasters, limited resources, illness, and more.
But internally, there are also our own shortcomings—impatience, selfish ambition, distraction, envy and so on. If I’m honest with myself, sometimes the biggest challenge I face at work is me.
How Work Can Be Healed
So now let’s take these “missing chapters” and see if they fit the story of work we know.
The story we know says that work is sick and broken. These terms suggest that the wrongness is an aberration, a departure from a true and healthy condition that’s “the way things should be.”
The story of the Bible says, just so. Work is created good, but has been warped by spiritual darkness. The “original” version of work is the thing we get bits and snatches of when work goes well for us now.
The story we know says that work could and should be better.
What does the Bible say about this longing?
On the one hand, the hope that the Bible offers is radically different from the techno-futurist optimism of, say, Wired magazine . The consistent Scriptural teaching on the pervasiveness of spiritual darkness in the human soul casts doubt on the idea that a new technology, system, or idea will supply humanity with a path to a utopian work future.
No, to deal with the thorns and thistles in our own hearts, we need someone to do some weeding. That is the Bible’s proposed solution for the evils of work: The redemption of human beings and human culture by the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ. God heals our work by healing us.
Healing: Cosmic and Personal
That’s not to say that we should understand healing in individualistic terms. The healing that the New Testament speaks of is cosmic. The apostle Paul writes that God’s purpose in sending Jesus Christ was “through him to reconcile to himself all things” (Colossians 1:20 ESV). The scope of God’s redemption is wider than the universe itself and will outlast its eventual heat death , if the physicists are right about how all things here (including all work) will come to an end.
At the same time, the way this healing was worked out in the ministry of Jesus himself was, generally speaking, one person at a time. The healing that the New Testament speaks of is personal.
Healing is usually gradual and ongoing. In his ministry, Jesus met people in the middle of their everyday lives. He can do that for us, too. He can come up to us right in the middle of our sick and broken work and bring his healing to us there.
For our moments of overwhelming work responsibility, Jesus frees us from burdensome expectations. He promises that there is nothing he expects us to do that he will not empower us by his grace to accomplish.
For the constraints of dehumanizing work environments, Jesus invites us into?a joyful life with God that can be realized even in the middle of suffering. He dignifies the suffering itself by making it a context for participating in his redemptive suffering on the cross. The Apostle Paul, no stranger to pain in his work, puts it like this: “For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Corinthians 1:5 ESV).
For the evils and injustices that oppress us, Jesus declares, “Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done” (Revelation 22:12 ESV). The unjust will be held accountable.
Making Work New
More than that, Jesus promises that the life of good work we imagine isn’t just a fairytale: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5 ESV). Jesus starts by making us new, ministering his healing presence to us in our work, no matter how sick and broken it is. But he doesn’t stop there. He promises he will eventually make the whole universe new, too. Everything, including our work, will be transformed by God’s glory and goodness.
By my lights, the story the Bible tells about the healing of work is inviting. The missing chapters fit the story I already know about work. They make sense of my frustrations, and of my longings. They give me a reason to suppose my hopes are grounded in something substantive, not just wishful thinking.
What about you? Do you think the chapters fit?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were true?
Reflect and Practice
Take a moment to consider your own heart.
Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash .
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