Community Post: It's Almost Summer. Are You Having Fun Yet?

bradleyjmoore — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:11:29 +0000

Bradley J. Moore challenges us to have a little fun this summer. He writes at his blog: "For some reason I had gotten into the bad habit of downplaying the lighter side of life, spending far too much time thinking about all of my responsibilities, my work, and the infinite number of chores and errands that must be done when I get home. If ever I tried to relax a bit, that abusive little voice in my head would tell me what a slacker I am." Read more here ...

Image by Katerina Plevkova. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Bradley J. Moore.

http://shrinkingthecamel.com/2012/05/21/its-almost-summer-are-you-having-fun-yet/

Author Name:

Bradley J. Moore

The Upside of Down

David Rupert — Sat, 19 May 2012 12:00:23 +0000

Unemployed? Financially stressed? Those of us who live under the High Calling understand that not everything is as it seems. God has a plan. Are you looking for it?Pick up the newspaper, listen to the talk at any coffee shop, look at the faces in the crowd, and you'll know that times are tough. It seems that nearly every industry has taken a hit, dragging investments, housing and basic security into the dark pit of uncertainty. And the personal toll has been huge. We're scared. We all know people who have been laid off, fired or whose jobs have disappeared altogether. For millions, months have now turned into years of unemployment or under-employment. Maybe this is you.

Author Name:

David Rupert

Serving God in the Healthcare Profession: Four Reflections

Marcus Goodyear — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:29:55 +0000

Our friends at The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture just published a fantastic series of articles about serving God in the healthcare profession. Four healthcare professionals reflect on what it means to listen in this profession. Web editor Jay Bilsborrow writes,

How does a fallen world begin to heal? How do the shattered pieces get put back together to form a picture that is even more beautiful than it was to begin with? The answer: piece by piece. Those called of God take up their vocations.

...This month we focus on the daily work of healthcare providers. Their work perhaps best exemplifies the importance of the practice of listening. We can be grateful for the thoughtful, skillful, and compassionate care doctors, nurses, and technicians provide daily to the broad spectrum of men, women, and children in need. Indeed, from a vocational perspective, having hands that bring healing and wholeness is tremendously honorable and redemptive work in God’s world.

Read more about Healthcare Provision and the Discipline of Listening or click through directly to the four vocational reflections from healthcare professionals:

On the Auscultation of the Heart by Dr. Ryan Buchholz
Are You Listening by Dr. Curt Thompson
Listening Is Not Hearing by Eden Garber
Listening in Medicine by Dr. Larry Bergstrom

Image by Eric Montfort. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.

Author Name:

Marcus Goodyear

Community Post: Teaching Vocation at a Young Age

LDPeabody — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:46:19 +0000

Before you went into the work world, did you receive any biblical instruction on choosing a job? More instruction would have saved me a world of heartache and humiliation at doing a bad job at work and justifying it as a necessary evil for doing ‘God’s work’ off-hours. Read the entire post here.

Image by Katerina Plevkova. Used with permission. Sourced via Flikr. Post by Newsletter Editor David Rupert.

http://calledintowork.com/articles/article.asp?articleID=113

Author Name:

Larry Peabody

A Lawyer Finds Ways to Honor God at Work

David Rupert — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:32:49 +0000

Josh is a High Calling network blogger who writes regularly over at Quieted Waters. His public legal work keeps his identity hidden, but his heart is fully exposed in his thoughtful posts. He is young in age, but wise in his words as he writes about what it means for young professionals to be faithful Christians.

He recently posted a series called, Nine Ways to Honor God at Work. There are excellent posts including the admonition to work diligently, to stop workplace theft of time and resources, and to serve your coworkers.

Read the whole series here and cheer on this young lawyer in a challenging workplace

Image by Paul Goyette. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.

Post by Newsletter Editor David Rupert

Author Name:

David Rupert

Two Easy Ways a Pastor Can Encourage People That All Work Matters

Marcus Goodyear — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:46:58 +0000

Two weeks ago, I went running with my pastor during lunch. You can do that in a small town. Somewhere around our second mile, we got to talking about Facebook and marketing segmentation and some of the boring details of my job that get me excited and make other people fall asleep.

My pastor listened attentively and encouraged me in my work. He asked questions. He offered some thoughts about his experiences with social media and what they might mean for the church. It was a good conversation because we both valued each other's knowledge. Not once did my pastor imply that my life would have more meaning if I had been called to serve God as a pastor or a missionary.

Thankfully, my pastor and my church understand that all good work matters to God. In some ways, I'm practically a pastor myself, working on a Christian website, talking about God all day. But I represent people in business and medicine and law and any number of secular jobs. Like many of them, I have attended churches where I was taught that my work didn't matter.

"It's all going to burn anyway," one of these pastors told me just a few years ago. Most pastors aren't so dismissive and condescending about work, they just don't know where to start. So instead, they preach the Bible admirably, connecting it to areas of life that the members of their congregation have in common--family, church, culture, community.

This afternoon, my friend Bob Carlton forwarded this link from a new article on faith and work by Richard Mouw. Mouw writes,

"My pastor has no idea of the kind of world I live in six days a week.” That came from a prominent businessperson, a venture capitalist, during a lunch we had together when I visited the city where he works.

And even though that particular comment was clearly a complaint, it was expressed in a larger context in which he was speaking quite warmly about his involvement in the local church.

His congregation has good programs for his children, and he and his wife are involved in a small group they find spiritually nurturing. His pastor preaches good, biblically based sermons. All of that is very positive in his mind. What is missing, though, is any sort of connection to his actual daily work experience.

Mouw goes on to offer two easy solutions for pastors. First, they can visit members of their congregation during the work day at their places of work, perhaps as part of a lunch meeting with the church member. Second, they can publicly pray during church for people who work in business, education, entertainment, web design, medicine, or other jobs that are important in the economic environment of the church's community.

This article speaks to our core purpose here at The High Calling. For over a decade, we have been encouraging people in their work that God cares about everything we do. We have encouraging articles, daily reflections, audio messages, informative and inspirational videos, and a strong, supportive community.

More recently, we began to reach out to churches directly, hoping to empower leaders with tools that will help them meet this need in their local congregation. We offer three new sermon outlines on faith and work every quarter. We are developing new small group curriculum with the Center for Faith & Work at LeTourneau University. And we are doing our best to help churches address the issue on Labor Day Sunday. We are even offering webinars to pastors to make the process as easy as possible for them. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, did I mention that we do all of this for free?

I apologize if I sound like I'm being pushy here. But I really believe in what we are doing here and the resources we are working on to help people integrate their faith and work.

The internet makes it hard for us to know what people find helpful. We have all sorts of metrics and numbers, but those numbers don't tell us the personal stories of transformation that happen in the heart of a reader.

Have you been touched by The High Calling? Tell us about it in the comments. Your message will encourage us, but it will also help us know how to serve you better in the future.

Image by H.J. Wesselink. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Marcus Goodyear, Senior Editor of The High Calling.

Author Name:

Marcus Goodyear

Community Post: Friends in the Workplace

mderusha — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:52:26 +0000

Do you have a best friend at work? Michelle DeRusha, a member of The High Calling community, tells us how having a close friend at work helped her productivity. She writes: "I swear we raised our kids together in those ten-minute bursts of conversation a day. All the joys and frustrations and fears, the euphoric highs and the cataclysmic lows that go hand-in-hand with parenting, and life, really, were exchanged within a 12-foot-by-12-foot office. ... I see now how we grounded each other; how we were each other’s life preserver in a wildly tossing sea."

Naked Tennis Ball Follow-Up

Laity Lodge Pilgrim — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:18:28 +0000

The Laity Lodge Pilgrim is going back to Laity Lodge to find the naked tennis ball he wrote about a few weeks ago. He has asked us for suggestions about what to do with it if he finds it again.

Image by Grant Harder. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.

http://www.laitylodge.org/pilgrim-posts/naked-tennis-ball-follow-up-8012/

Author Name:

Laity Lodge Pilgrim

What Do People Value in a Career? Love or Money?

David Rupert — Sun, 06 May 2012 06:00:04 +0000

The New York Times studied key words in commencement speeches last year and found the words "love" and "world" showed up far more often than "money" and "success." Does this mean there's a shift in what people value most in their careers? Read the article here.

Image by Emilie Eagan, Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Newsletter Editor David Rupert

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/us/12intro.html

Author Name:

David Rupert

3 Practical Steps for Balancing Work and Family

Marcus Goodyear — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:28:55 +0000

You work hard. Does that inspire your kids to work hard too? Or does it make them resent your work? This is something I wonder sometimes when I am clicking away on the keyboard of my laptop from home and my children are not getting my full attention.

I don't want to be the dad who is physically present but always working inside his head, always quick to pull out the phone and answer one more email, send one more tweet, post one more link.

The irony is not lost on me. I am Senior Editor of a site that is about faith and work, balance and focus, honoring God in our jobs by having a holistically balanced life.

And I want to work all the time.

Of course, working too much isn't good for us. And it's not even productive. Time Magazine recently reminded me about the old Ford Motor Company tests in the early 1900s. Ford found that people work best (in factories at least) when they don't push past 40 hours per week. This is why Time Magazine confidently advises, "Stop Working More than 40 Hours a Week."

I'm trying. Really.

Perhaps there is hope for me in this recent article from Cristina Alger at The New York Times titled For One More Day at the Office. Rather than worry about working too much, rather than worry about burn out, she focuses on rediscovering the joy of work.

As a kid, she played work, which she called "Office," because she knew the office was so important to her father. But even more than that, she knew her dad loved his work. Here's an excerpt from her wonderful essay about children discovering their own joy of work:

There was one phase I went through — I was 6 at the time, maybe 7 — when I would get home from school, race upstairs and close my door. I didn’t have homework yet. I was working on something far more sophisticated than coloring books or puzzles. I was playing Office. In order to play Office, I had to get into character. I would don one of my dad’s suit jackets — I preferred a nice gray pinstripe — and would attempt to balance a spare pair of his glasses on my small snub nose. Sometimes I would shuffle around in his wingtips. Then I would organize piles of papers on my desk, filing them away in folders once they had been properly reviewed. If the mood struck me, I pretended to read The Wall Street Journal.

My mother would sometimes come up to check on me; she would knock gently, ask if I wanted a snack. “Not now, Mom!” I’d call back through the unopened door, my voice strained with urgency. “I’m working!”

...My dad was then, and remains to this day, one of the few grown-ups I have come across who truly loved his job. He would come home filled with stories about Wall Street. His enthusiasm for work was infectious. Dad loved playing office; why wouldn’t I? The grown-up manners that I was observing weren’t necessarily stress or busyness (though both of these existed in abundance in our house) but rather excitement and passion. Dad’s office was the source, so I recreated that in my own bedroom.

My friend and colleague Mark D. Roberts linked to The New York Times piece from his Patheos blog last week, during some spare moment when he wasn't writing more Daily Reflections for The High Calling.

Between us, I'm not convinced that Mark is only working 40 hours a week either.

Mark concludes his short post with some thought provoking questions:

I am one of millions of people in our society who ponder the impact of my work life on my family, especially on my children. Is my tendency to work lots of hours a downer for them, or a positive example of diligence? Will my children look back upon their experiences of my workplace with happy memories? Will they find anything in my work life they want to imitate? Apart from providing for my family, how has my work experience, including how I talk about it at home, made a difference in the way my children think about work?

After a little reflection, let me try to deliver on the promise I made in the title of this article. I want to balance my worklife and my family life. I want to be productive at work but engage fully with my kids. And I also want to engage with them in a way that will inspire them to love their work and have healthy boundaries themselves.

So I'm resolved to do three things.

First, Don't Work at Home

I have to set better boundaries with my cell phone and my laptop. When I get home, I will take the phone out of my pocket, plug it in to the charger in the cabinet, and close the cabinet door. If there is a big emergency, people will call. I will leave the laptop in my bag in case of High Calling web emergencies.

Second, Share the Joy of Work

Instead of complaining and moaning and being despondent about frustrated ambitions, I will share my enthusiasm about work. And I will do this without shame. So what if I am really excited about the spreadsheets showing our incredible click through rate on our Facebook ads this past weekend? It may be a boring detail to my kids, but they will remember my enthusiasm long after they have forgotten their own boredom with the details.

Third, Do Fun Stuff

I am going camping with my son's cub scout pack this weekend, and I am going to devote my attention fully to him and the experience. Thankfully, my phone won't even work where we are going. Then Sunday after church, we are going to see The Avengers. Oh yeah.

How about you? What practical steps can you take to keep good boundaries and be more positive?

Image by Cali2Okie (April). Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr. Post by Marcus Goodyear.

Author Name:

Marcus Goodyear