“How Are Our Lives Different at Church and at Work?” - Doug Barr

As John Castle points out in his excellent post Stop Compartmentalizing Your Life, we have a tendency to put our lives on an assembly line; each piece assembled separately from all the others. We maximize our efficiency by trying to juggle responsibilities, and as a result we tend to divide our personalities to keep it all from crashing down. We try to protect our sanity by isolating our 'work' selves from the rest of who we are.

This is the wisdom of the hyper-efficient world we live in, but is it the wisdom of faith? Are we here to become as many different versions of ourselves as we can, or to be made whole?

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TRANSCRIPT: One of the reasons that it's difficult to connect spiritual values to our work is we've bought the idea that they're two separate worlds and that you can't be a nice person at work. You've got to be an SOB and push people and treat them the way you wouldn't treat your family at home or your friends at church, because it's a different world. It's a dog eat dog world out there. This isn't the Church. I've found that to be absolutely false; it's a false dichotomy. It makes no sense. You can hold people responsible for performance. You can discipline them in a fair and respectful way and get good performance out of them, without belittling them or bullying them or really making them embarrassed.

People have made it a false dichotomy. They think they're two different worlds and they're not. They're God's world. He's wherever you are, and He's giving you an opportunity to be the person you can be with people, whether they're at home or at work.