Why Does Work Stink?
Jeremy MacDonald · Tidal Church Moncton · January 5, 2025 · Redeeming Your Routine series
Jeremy MacDonald explores Genesis 3:17-19 to show why work can be frustrating: work itself is good and was given before the fall, but it is now cursed. He invites listeners to work for God as their audience, trusting no labour is in vain.
More from Jeremy MacDonald · The Redeeming Your Routine series
Topics: Identity, Purpose, Work
Transcript
[0:00] Let's talk about some crazy jobs. Okay, I'm gonna start. The one that I always think about and go back to when I think about work. And it wasn't the whole job, it was just, and this is your story too. It's not like entire jobs are always awful or weird or meaningless or ridiculous, but everybody's got the stories and you've got a few of, like, just a piece of the job or a part of it is just, I don't know, drove you nuts or it felt off, or it, you know, it was, it was stinky. It stunk. And so for me, I always think about going back to the hotel I worked at. I was a bellman growing up. And so, not growing up, I was younger, is what I'm trying to say there. And if you've not seen a bellman before at sometimes fancy hotels, there's somebody that brings the luggage cart, we'll load your luggage for you and take it up and help you out with everything and then, you know, smile at the end and hopefully get a tip.
[0:51] And I have a good smile. I got lots of tips. It was nice. You guys can appreciate that. Yeah. So what happened was, is partway through the summer I was working there, my boss came to me and he said, "I've got a brand new luggage cart." It was a fancy shiny gold one that was really heavy, really awkward, didn't quite fit around the corners as much. And he gave me polish and said, "I wanna make sure that this gold luggage cart I've spent so much money on stays nice and shiny with no fingerprints on it. So would you polish it and get all the fingerprints off it at all times?" Now, do you know how luggage carts work? You take them and put your grubby fingerprints all over them all the time. That's how you use the luggage cart. And so for the rest of the summer, I had this brutal experience of spending all this time polishing a luggage cart with stinky metal polish, and then immediately afterwards putting my hands on it and getting them all grungy and putting all of my fingerprints all over it again.
[1:49] And it became this meaningless struggle that I absolutely hated. And now I get to tell you all about it. So, sometimes work, and you've had these experiences, you get the work that just feels meaningless and feels like it's a lot of a struggle. And your work could be the work that you're doing that you get paid for. You get a T4, it's coming in the mail, it's exciting. Maybe not the mail, maybe it's you just on your payroll thing, but either way you get money for your work and that's your job. That's great. Some of you, your work isn't something you get paid for. And that category can be if you are, let's say a student, you know, your work is your preparation and your learning. You know, if we haven't met before, I've got a family, I've got a wife and three kids. Our kids are nine, six and five, they're all in school.
[2:36] And so we tell them, your job or part of your job is to go to school and it's to try to convince them that they need to keep going to school and learning. And so that's your job. You work at it and it's difficult and it can have challenges to it, and parts that feel redundant or frustrating or meaningless or stinky throughout the day. For some of you, your work isn't necessarily school and you still don't get paid for it. Maybe you're a stay at home parent or you're a stay at home for your parents because they're older and they need to be looked after. I don't know what that's called. But that's kind of like the next phase of stay at home parent, but you're staying at home with your parents. We'll figure it out. But the point is, is that you have a work and a job to do looking after and caring for people. And it doesn't, it's not that it's meaningless, but there's probably seasons where you're like, "Ah, is it even worth the effort that I put into it?"
[3:28] You know, if you've ever had, you know, kids and you've put the effort into trying to create this beautiful meal for them, it's like really healthy and you gave them like the fruits and you cut the veggies into dinosaurs and like you put all the work and you put it on the table and they're like, "Can I have a bowl of Cheerios?" They're like, you want to flip the table. At that point, the idea is that our work, our work is a struggle sometimes. And there's all sorts of reasons for that. And it's all sorts of reasons that you've perhaps experienced, and that's what we wanna wrestle with and talk about because it's real life for you and it's real life for me. And it's not even the jobs that are like, you know, bellman jobs. I've had some wonderful, I enjoyed that job, you know, and that was really good. I've worked in the service industry at a restaurant and that was wonderful, but there was parts to that too.
[4:17] But even this kind of job, you know, I get a chance to be a pastor the last 15 years and there's great parts about being a pastor and there's also all sorts of struggles to being a pastor. And so it's not like you have to find the best job. All of them have these moments. You know, I think about the first time, I was actually working at this church, some of you'll remember this, I started here in 2009 as the youth pastor and the first time leading the youth group, the youth night, I was so excited because I put all this effort and energy into preparing and we had a big team and we had a bunch of students coming. It was absolutely incredible. And I'll never forget just these dreams of like impact and making a difference and, and this is gonna be such a life-giving experience.
[5:02] And that very first night that I was a youth pastor leading our youth group, and we were almost at the very end of the night in the atrium and a youth leader came up and said, "The church is on fire." Which I said, "No, I mean, that's silly. What happened?" And he's like, "No, I think the church is on fire. There's smoke billowing outta the basement." To which I said, "No, that's not even possible. I mean, it's kind of like a brick building, like it can't lit on fire." Sure enough, this kid had shown up for the first time, had lit a thing on fire, put it in the lockers that are now over there. They were in the basement and it actually lit on fire. Smoke was billowing out the side of the building. We had to evacuate the place, call 911. As the parents were arriving to pick their kids up from their youth night with the brand new youth pastor, all of the ambulance and the fire trucks were arriving, first responders were coming into the building as smoke.
[5:55] And you could see it billowing out of the exit there coming out of the building. And that was my first night. I was spending time at the RCMP office downtown, filing police reports thinking, "This isn't worth it." This is crazy. I was wanting to make a difference. And work sometimes just takes a whole other turn. Hey, for you it's a little bit different. Why does work stink? Your story. You'll find it in this list at some point. I'm sure for some of you it's about bad bosses. You think about that. We're not gonna go into stories, we're not gonna tell personal stories from the stage because this is recorded and my bosses watch these messages. But the point is that there are experiences you've had and the reason that work stinks for you is it's tied to the supervision of the people that you work with. And it's just like, man, this would be so much better without them.
[6:42] And yet this is a part of the experience and you've had it, you know, it's silly tasks. It's like, I like this part of the job, but why do I have to do this part of the job? It's broken systems. You know, if you could just explain to the people at the top, you can make it so much better, or it's about the crazy customers and you deal with them day in and day out. Work would be so much better without the customers, which there wouldn't be work, but you know, for you, maybe it's no appreciation. You think about, man, I've given so much to this place, why don't they realize how valuable I am? And so work carries this frustration in your heart because you're giving so much of your energy and yet nobody seems to notice the difference that you're making, or unfair treatment, like you've been here.
[7:27] And why would they instead give the promotion or the raise to this other person? Or it's stressful, like, man, I just wish I could be in a place that's just simpler. And I remember actually when I was doing my university career and it was kind of stressful. I thought it was stressful. You know, this is how it goes, right? I was just writing papers and I lived on my own and ate Oreos and drank Pepsi at night. Like, it was a really easygoing experience in university. But I thought it was stressful. And I remember at night when I was staying up late writing these papers, it was in Saskatchewan and it was on the highway. And I would see these truck drivers driving by and I thought, maybe I should become a truck driver. I bet you they don't have stress. And then I watch TikTok videos now of truck drivers driving New York City and I'm like, oh, that's really stressful. So, you know, there's stress everywhere, but you've had stress in your work and you just wish it would not be that way, or that you're always on.
[8:15] You're always having to receive the calls or check the emails and you don't get the work life balance that you're hoping for. Work stinks sometimes, not all the time, but a lot of the time. Why is that? Well, the truth, the truth is that it's not a new problem. It's not a North American problem. It's not a Moncton problem, it's not a you problem, it's not a capitalism problem. It's not a 21st century problem. Work has actually been stinky for a very long time. Time, in fact, work from almost the very beginning has had an issue with it.
[9:02] And the fascinating thing about when we gather in this kind of way, if you're new to this kind of place, is we gather around and we open up these ancient scriptures, the Christian scriptures, to discover the truth of what has been handed down from generation to generation about the God of the universe and what He might say to us and to you for today and this week. And we discover in the very beginning narrative about the creation of the world that God actually speaks very explicitly about work. And actually the question, why does work stink, gets answered at the very beginning. And so I want to take us all the way back to that very beginning creation narrative.
[9:49] We find it in what we would call the book of Genesis. It's in the Christian scriptures, is the very open of the Bible. It's also for those that are Jewish and have grown up in that movement. And they would find at the beginning of their Torah the same narrative. It's the one that we share together about the creation of how God has made all of humanity. And it's a fascinating story. If you haven't read it in a while or if you've never read it, you should absolutely this week look through. It speaks so much to the human condition about how you're made, how you're wired, who you are, and speaks to a lot of what you have experienced as somebody living here in Moncton of all places, or wherever you're watching from online. And the story goes is that God created things perfectly, absolutely perfectly created.
[10:37] The garden provided for Adam and Eve, gave them the things that they need, gave them a job to do. And then something terrible happened. The snake came with deception and told Eve and questioned God. And God had given one rule to Adam, to Eve, not to eat the one particular fruit. There was lots of other fruit, there's lots of other food, but there's one rule. Avoid this one spot. And sure enough, they ate from that tree. And so in that moment of disobeying God, in that moment of there being one rule, stepping across the line and having that original sin, Adam and Eve realized the problem and the issue, and their eyes were open and all of a sudden they knew, we've done something wrong. And so they hide from God, and God comes looking for them, wanting to restore relationship and come back close to them, and they hide from God. And as He speaks to them and asks them what happened, He explains and walks through the consequences for the actions of sinfulness, the actions of stepping away from the life that God has explained and called them into. And He explains what the consequences of their sin really is.
[12:01] And it's in that moment that we're gonna step into the story and hear how God brings that consequence and explanation to Adam. And it's gonna give us a deep understanding of work as we kick things off here. So let's go to Genesis 3:17-19, God speaking: Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat. Now this part of the story sometimes gets this interesting twist to it where people assume because Eve was the one that took the fruit and ate it and then gave it to Adam, that it's all her fault. Now people use that for weird things, like all of a sudden they assume because of Eve's sinfulness that now the way that you, you know, have a conversation with your wife could be different.
[12:46] It's like, how do you get that? That's not at all what's happening here, but I want you to take note of how God interacts with Adam who did receive from Eve the fruit. And yet God's gonna clear things up pretty quickly here. So He says, "I commanded you not to eat that fruit. The ground is now cursed because of you." So as God explains the curse to Adam, He's clarifying. It's not because of Eve's sin, Adam, it's because of your sin. It's because of the thing that you did that you are now reaping the consequences of. And here's the thing, for some of you, you know, sometimes it's easy to look at the person that handed you the fruit and think, "Ah, it's their fault that I'm as messed up as I am." This is a bit of an aside, but let's be clear, Adam knew what he was doing, and you do too.
[13:39] And so we take a little bit of ownership over who we are and our own autonomy and realize that when we mess up, we own up. And this is what happens for Adam. So God says, "I commanded you not to eat it. The ground is cursed because of you all your life. You will struggle to scratch a living from it." The ground being this explanation of now how you're going to provide for yourself, God had provided in the garden, it was provided for them. It was there. God had given them so much, and now they're gonna experience a much different life of having to provide and scratch out a living from the ground, their sustenance. And this is the curse. This is the curse on their work.
[14:27] It goes on. God says it will grow the ground, thorns and thistles for you. Though, even though there's gonna be thorns and thistles in the ground, although it's gonna be difficult, you will eat of its grains. There's still gonna be good things that come from it. You're still gonna be able to provide for yourself from it. It's gonna be both. And at the same time, by the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat. It's gonna be hard. You're gonna exert yourself. You're gonna till the soil and then you will have some of the benefits of it. Both are gonna happen at the same time. It's a curse, but there's still something good in the midst of it. Until you return to the ground from which you were made, for you were made from dust and to dust you will return.
[15:17] It's this interesting shift, this curse, this addition now to the work that is going to be the thing that carries through to this day. Now, as you read that, you might think, "Oh, that explains everything. Work is awful and terrible because it is this thing that God dropped on us because of the sinfulness." And no, actually something different is happening here. You have to kinda watch for it. So the work is now cursed, but it's not that the work is a bad thing. And the reason we know that is that if you actually go to the very beginning in Genesis, you actually discover work existed before the original sin, before the fall of man, before they ate of the fruit, work existed. God actually worked in His creation of the world, and we are made in His image. But not only that, if we go back to Genesis 1, this is what we discovered in Genesis 1, before the fall, before the snake, before all of that, God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it.
[16:22] These words that are action oriented that require something of you, reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground." And then again in chapter 2, explaining about what happens here. The Lord took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it. And so in the midst of it, but this is all before the fall, we realized God actually created us with His image on us. And that carries with it this part of us that needs to and is expected to and wants to work. That's actually a good thing. And so kind of put this way, if this helps explain it a little bit, is that work isn't a curse. We didn't receive work as a curse, as a responsibility because of the sinfulness of Adam and Eve. Work isn't a curse, but it is cursed.
[17:17] Work itself is, it's not perfect. There's a struggle to it that has these good moments where we experience and know the fruitfulness of it, and we can provide for the people around us. We can look after the people around us, we can show up for the people around us. And yet there's these frustrations that come with it, and that's baked into it. It's why so many of you, and so, so many people in our culture are not excited to go to work tomorrow. The commentators talk about this particular verse and explain it with a little bit of an understanding around what's going on in the midst of the curse. So Gordon Wenham says this, he says, "Man's offense consisted of eating the forbidden fruit.
[18:04] Therefore he is punished in what he eats. The toil that now lies behind the preparation of every meal is a reminder of the fall and is made the more painful by the memory of the ready supply of food within the garden." He goes on to kind of encapsulate, "This work itself is not a punishment for sin. Man was placed in the garden to cultivate it, rather it was the hardship and frustration that attended work that constitutes a curse." Or put this way, Tim Keller writes about this in his book, Every Good Endeavor, "In other words, work, even when it bears fruit, is always painful. Often miscarries and sometimes kill us." Hopefully not literally, but sometimes.
[18:51] And it can feel like it's killing us sometimes, right? This is the nature of our work. There's a curse attached to it. And sometimes just recognizing it and understanding that is helpful enough to take the weight off of you because you might think you're doing something wrong, that your work isn't as fulfilling as you want it to be, right? Like somebody somewhere told you or built up this expectation that you are gonna experience all sorts of fulfillment in your job. And then you're in the back washing the dishes and you're like, "Was this what they were talking about?" Right? Like the almost the worst thing, the worst question that you could ask a 10-year-old is, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
[19:40] Now you've asked it and I've asked it, so I'm not like, this is an Allstate, this is, we're all taking a little bit of responsibility for it. But it's a terrible question to ask because what it's saying, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, is that you look at a 10-year-old and you say, "Hey, in 2040, what are you gonna be doing in January at 9:00 AM on a Wednesday?" I think you don't know what you're gonna be doing in 2040 on a Wednesday morning at 9:00 AM. You've got no sweet clue, 'cause life is complicated and it shifts and it changes. But more than that, this idea that we have to come up with this grand vision for who we're gonna become and our contributions and that we can stack all this kind of meaning into it, it puts too much weight that our work was never really meant to carry.
[20:31] And so the Christian writers is, we try to wrestle through and help us maybe spell out a better, for those of us that, you know, follow Jesus and have maybe been Christians for a while, to try to carry a conversation about a theology of work. How should we think about our work? Is our faith, does it inform our work at all? And the answer is absolutely, but maybe for many of us, it hasn't for a season. It's almost like we do our faith and then our work life is separated, but the problems arise when we realize our work has so much struggle to it. And if we could let our faith inform our work, I think, it would be so much, we'd be so much richer for it. So there's this writer, this pastor, in the Pacific Northwest, his name's John Mark Comer, and he wrote this beautiful book on work called Garden City.
[21:24] It's absolutely worth a read. And he kind of goes back to this original curse, and there's actually a curse even before that. So Eve receives a curse about childbearing and there's stuff in there about family relationships as well that kind of play into it. And then John Mark Comer actually even expands. And it helps us understand sometimes that curse as it relates to work. We see the struggle in work and we assume maybe work is just bad and wrong, and so we wanna exit it as quickly and often as possible. And so then we just look for rest or leisure. And this shows up obviously as like, "Let's work for the weekend." You know, put in your time, get in your tickets, go on EI so that you can just enjoy life and you live for your rest as opposed to your work. But you discover over time, if you've ever tried that, is that even your rest doesn't quite fulfill.
[22:13] There's still a struggle in the midst of rest and there's still a struggle in family and there's this struggle in what he would say is the field, your work, the way he articulates it, it might be helpful for you. And trying to understand this is whether we look to the family or to the field or even to rest. None of these things, as fantastic as they are, or will ever yield the kind of life that we crave, at least not all by themselves. All of these something push us to someone, you know, even in our day and age, in our culture, as you think about the invitation to, you know, dream about what you might do for work, that's kind of more of a more recent phenomenon. You know, for most of history, you know, you had to think about work, you had to do work for sure, but this idea that anything was possible was not at all on the table.
[23:06] Like if you go back, you know, 250 years ago and, say, you can be anything you wanna be, imagine you can go to the moon. They're like, "What do you mean?" No, like, my father did this, I'm gonna do that. You know, my mother was responsible for the business and this way and this is what we're gonna work into. And there's this, a writer you might have heard of, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He's a Russian who lived in the awful times in Russia around the gulags and actually spent time in the Russian gulags in kind of this prison experience. And then he became an intellectual and wrote a wide range of just fascinating pieces and kind of spoke to this uniquely, maybe it's even a North American thing or a western thing, but this unique approach where we we might find fulfillment because we have ultimate freedom in being able to choose and do anything we want.
[23:53] And so in the late seventies, he actually came over and did this university tour and spoke and he spoke exactly to this. And it's, here we are, like 50 years later still kind of feeling this one out. This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said. He said, "200 or even 50 years ago would've seemed quite impossible in America that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims." And when you talk to young people, some of the work that I get to do is actually with an organization called the Youth Worker Community. And so we talk and work with youth workers across our country of Canada. And a couple years ago we did this survey of over 2000 young adults in Canada, and we got a chance to ask them all sorts of fascinating, interesting questions and work kind of came up as a part of it and our understanding and our theology and the way that people process and think about work and why does this become such a struggle for us?
[24:49] And our lead researcher, Rick Hetra, he interviewed dozens of students kind of one-on-one and in conversation, and he wrote this about our overemphasis on our work, providing our meaning in life. And this is what he found. He said, "Many young adults saw a career as a reflection of their identity and were not able to choose a career because the question of their identity was not settled. Most young adults knew, however, that they wanted to avoid dull, passionless, monotonous work." In fact, one young adult said this as a part of the conversations, "If you don't love what you do, you aren't doing what you feel called to do, and you aren't gonna be happy." And I was talking to this business owner last week about this very thing in Moncton. It's like so difficult to find young adults willing to do dull, monotonous work.
[25:40] Do you know how many jobs are dull and monotonous? Most of them. Because work isn't always about experiencing the big joys of wonderful meaning in the midst of it. Sometimes you're painting another wall, sometimes you're washing another dish, sometimes you're bringing another Play-Doh to another person. Sometimes you're cleaning another floor. And if we lose sight of the fact that there could be goodness, even in the midst of that dull, monotonous work, we might miss something that God is inviting us into. 'Cause in Genesis, and this is it, right? This is the verse: the ground is cursed.
[26:25] It is, work is cursed. Your life will struggle as you scratch a living from it. That's true. But the other is true too, that He put man, and He put him in the garden to work it and to take care of it. And that the God of the universe is moving us back into the life that He wanted to create in this world today. And He's giving us meaning and purpose because He's the one that brings it because he's the one that brings it And He's the one that created us, and He's the one that made us. And so if you've not heard this before, you just need to know that work is not the meaning of life. And if you try to stack everything into your work or even into your rest, it's not gonna fulfill you.
[27:12] But we have to also acknowledge that without work, you don't have a meaningful life. You have to wrestle with that too. I wanna skip ahead to kind of these bottom lines, because I think for us, as we start things off, I think the idea is that we need to understand about our work potentially can reshape and reform how we walk into next week, this week. And what ends up happening maybe is not that it's an earth shattering, everything adjusts kind of experience, but instead maybe just starts to edge us towards perhaps a little bit more of what God is inviting us into.
[28:02] And so I want you to know that there's kind of three things that I would really love for you to catch. So if we go past this slide, Eby, and into just this list of three is that work really is cursed. It is part of a meaningful life. But work should have one audience. And this is where we separate a bit. If you're here and you're not a Christian, if you don't necessarily believe everything that we believe, this is me inviting you into something, maybe that could be a little bit different. And this is something that might be a bit of a stretch for you, and that's understandable, I get that. But I wonder if maybe if there's a God in the universe who created you and knows who you are and your story and actually created you on purpose for His purposes.
[28:54] I wonder if when you look at your week in your work, if He became the core audience that you're working for, it starts to change and adjust how you view even your work. Because work stinks because it's cursed. But there's still more to the story. And we're gonna explore that over the next few weeks. But before we do, there's this story, and I read a quote from Tim Keller who wrote this fascinating book, Every Good Endeavor, and he kind of put me onto because he writes about a short story by Tolkien. So if you know Lord of the Rings, that's Tolkien, a phenomenal author, and he wrote this book called Leaf, or the short story Leaf by Niggle. Niggles, this character in this book that has an image in his mind of, as an artist, of this grand tree that he wants to paint.
[29:49] And it's this allegory of people's lives and our lives as we try to accomplish and to do the work that we end up doing. And for some of it it can feel like, you know, we're washing the dish, we're bringing the meal, we're checking the box. And for Niggle, he had this vision of this grand tree that he wanted to be able to paint, but in his time on earth, because of all the different responsibilities that he had, the thing that he was able to actually walk away with by the end of his life was really just this small leaf that was a part of this bigger picture. And that was the thing that was left behind. And the people that knew him, you know, had it framed. And in the story Niggle goes onto the afterlife. And in the afterlife, Tolkien being a Christian, he gets a chance to see this grand tree that he was a part of, but it was only in the afterlife that he caught that his one little leaf that he had been painting was a part of this grand tree that he had caught a vision for and that the little leaf that he had painted had lasted and lived on, but only because of the God of the universe painting all things together for the good of what He was inviting us into.
[31:10] And so where I, you know, as you process and you think about work and the struggle and there's goodness in it and there's difficulty in it, I'm kind of reminded by this quote from Keller, as if you're not somebody of faith, what you end up struggling with is that sometimes, and maybe this is your experience, that things can feel quite meaningless and difficult and you wonder if there's purpose in it and if it's worth it. And this is what Keller would write. This is what he explains. He says, you imagine accomplishing things, but you've discovered that you are largely incapable of producing them. You have hoped for good big things in your life and work that, you know, carries you through and has all sorts of benefits to it. And that has meaning to it for you.
[31:57] You wanna be successful rather than forgotten, and you want to make a difference in life. But that's beyond the control of any of us. So he says, if this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun. And no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Exciting. Everyone will be forgotten. You're just a couple generations from nobody remembering your name. Nothing you do will make any difference and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to nothing unless, and this is the point, and this is what you need to hear.
[32:48] And this is what you need to carry. And this is what you need to wrestle with. And this is what I hope for each and every one of us becomes the thing that we think about when we think about our work. Unless there's a God, if the God of the Bible exists and there's this true reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones pursued in response to God's calling can matter forever. And that is what the Christian faith promises. In the Lord, your labor is not in vain because when you're there on your own trying to do the right thing, there is a God who's watching you. When you're trying, you're tested because you could just walk away.
[33:37] The God of the universe is the one watching you. When you're offering your best in the midst of a job or a career that feels like nobody's noticing you, there's a God who notices you when you're wondering if your integrity matters because surely nobody would notice. The God of the universe is watching you. And all of those things, even the things that feel so meaningless and difficult and maybe just not worth it, at times, the God of the universe is watching. And yes, your work is cursed. Yes, it's not gonna be fulfilling at all times. And yet because God is in it and with you and for you, you can know that your work is not in vain.
[34:25] And that even the simplest things can make a dramatic difference. And so this is what I want to do. It's a little bit different. I would love for us to process these kinds of things. So if you're in a small group later on this week, you get a chance to have a conversation about your work and about the cursed work. But if you're not, you can still have conversations, You can think about these things, you can rattle them around. The point is to take the Scriptures and let them speak in and work through our souls and our minds. So I just have a few questions for you to think about, and I want to give you just a few moments even here today before we go. In what ways is your work actually cursed? And what would change if you actually accepted that and realized that? Or maybe for you, how much of your identity is wrapped up in work or in rest?
[35:14] And how has your view of work been unhelpful or maybe untrue? Would you take even just a few moments here? If you came with somebody, you can ask the person next to you, "Hey, what of those three questions, which one sticks out? Which one sparked the minute that you saw it? You've got a thought of it or an answer of..." If you're just by yourself, you didn't come with anybody, just take these a few moments and kind of wrestle them through. If you're a Christian, if you believe in a God, let God and the Holy Spirit speak to your heart and remind you of how He sees you in the work that you're doing. And as you process these things, come back to the Scriptures and know that the God of the universe that created you put His image on you so that the things that He wants us to be a part of, that we're ready for.
[36:02] Let me pray.