Vocation or Idolatry? Loving Your Work Without Losing Yourself

For a lot of churchgoing folks, Sunday is the day set aside for rest, reflection, repentance and community. We all know our spiritual life isn't supposed to live in a one-day window, but if we're being honest, it sure seems like that's how it often plays out.

Something interesting is happening at work too, where that void of spiritual dedication Monday through Friday is being filled by a call to our (over)work.

Workaholism isn't new, but as Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic points out in his Fast Company article, "Are You a Spiritual Workaholic?", it's not really about the hours anymore. It's about our experience of and connection to work, and that connection carries a cost we can't always pay.

We're a family of runners. A runner loves to run, but if running too hard, whether from a desire to improve or because running has become the identity, leads to an injury that keeps you from running at all, the pendulum has swung out of balance. The love didn't change. The balance did. That's what we risk when we attach too much of ourselves to the place we work.

In leadership circles, there's a lot of talk right now about selling the meaning and purpose behind the work as a driver of employee engagement. The more people are bought into the mission, the more effort they give. On the surface, nothing wrong with that. But it starts walking the tricky spiritual edge of vocation versus idolatry. Vocation is work held as stewardship, something you show up to faithfully without needing it to hold your whole identity. Idolatry is when that same work quietly becomes the thing your worth is built on, so much so that losing it would feel like losing yourself.

Corporations will fail. Employees will be let go. Leaders will disappoint you. A well-intended mission doesn't always land with enough people to pay the bills.

The old idea of vocation was never that the task itself was sacred. It was about how you showed up to it. Faithfully, with integrity, doing right by people. A farmer plowing a field had a vocation. The plowing itself wasn't the calling, but somewhere along the way we started marketing the task as the calling instead of the attitude toward it. A field has edges. Only so much ground, only so much daylight. A calling marketed as limitless has no edges at all. There's always more mission to serve and always a reason to keep (over)working.

If we spiritualize work too much, we risk inheriting long-suffering too, only this time it's self-induced. In the spiritual sense, long-suffering is patient endurance of hardship for something eternal. Whether you believe in eternal life or not, there's nothing eternal about the reward waiting at the end of most jobs.

None of this means we shouldn't care about our work. I care about mine a lot. Just build a self that's bigger than the job, so you can love the work without it being the only thing holding you up.