The Similarities of Work & Faith

This week on the blog, we complete our "Following Jesus at Work & School" series with an article from Riverwood's own Nate Luck. Nate lives in Waverly, works in Cedar Falls, is married to Lyndsi (with whom he has two wonderful girls - Isabelle & Briella), and is an avid outdoorsman. Enjoy learning from Nate this week!

Awhile back, Erin invited me to write a post about dealing with the stresses of work as part of the series he was doing on the Riverwood blog. Just so you know, I am in the early stages of my walk with Christ. As a result, my knowledge of biblical teachings and Scripture is still quite limited, so I took Erin’s invitation to write this post as a motivator for digging deeper into Scripture to further develop my relationship with Christ.

Due to the “newness” of my faith, I do not feel qualified to administer any type of advice. So I decided to refrain from quoting Scripture to show how the Bible can help you to deal with stress at work. (I can tell you that if you need advice on the subject, a search of the phrase “How the Bible can help deal with stress at work” will return a plethora of blogs on the subject. I even found a few that have helped change my own perspective.)

Instead, I would like to share how this assignment has helped me realize there is a lot of work in being a follower of Christ. Over the past few weeks I have come to realize a few key similarities between work and faith in Jesus:

Four Similarities

• Work- Obviously you have to work to be successful at work (it probably wouldn’t be called work otherwise), and you have to work at your faith (a point I had somewhat neglected). I had taken the plunge and accepted Christ as my Savior, but until recently I had not realized just how much “work” actually following Christ would be.

• Change is hard- Change can be a challenge in any situation (Our brains are actually hardwired to avoid it), but it can be especially challenging at work. I also found that in matters of faith, change can be difficult. It was hard for me to accept Christ as my Savior, but I now realize it was even harder to accept the impact that this change would have on my life as a whole.

• Attitude is everything- At work, it can be easy to get drawn into negative patterns, and this negativity can have a serious impact on how well we perform our jobs. Likewise, in faith, this negativity is manifested through sin, and we all know how easy it is to be consumed by this!

• Lastly, there is a payout in the end- For work, the true payout is not monetary. The true payout of work is that it gives us purpose. For faith, the payout is eternal life.