When we hear the word work, most of us probably think first about employment.
What do you do for a living? What is your job? Your career? Your vocation?
For me, the answer is pastor. That is work I do. It is work for which I am compensated. It is part of how I spend a great deal of my time.
But work is larger than employment.
Work is washing the dishes.
It is vacuuming the floor.
It is preparing dinner.
It is writing an email, making a phone call, walking to the office, talking with a neighbor, caring for someone, folding laundry, or clearing snow from the sidewalk.
Work is one of the ways we encounter the world beyond ourselves.
And perhaps one way of saying it is this:
Work is the inner life learning how to have hands.
What is within us begins to take shape outside of us.
Compassion becomes listening.
Care becomes a meal.
Attention becomes an email thoughtfully written.
Love becomes a conversation in which another person feels heard.
Hospitality becomes a room prepared for someone who is coming.
Even solitary work enters into a larger field of relationship. The meal we prepare will feed someone. The sidewalk we clear makes a path for another body. The room we clean becomes a place that receives another person.
Our inner life is always finding some way to enter the world.
But there is an important distinction.
Our work is not our worth
If work is an expression of who we are, it can be very easy to confuse that expression with our value.
I know this temptation.
If I preach a sermon that seems to go especially well, it can feel good. If an episode of the Infinitely Precious Podcast receives far more listens than usual, it can feel affirming.
But what happens the next week when the numbers go back down?
Am I suddenly worth less?
If a sermon falls flat, am I less precious?
If I mishandle a conversation, forget something important, or simply have a day when I am not at my best, has my value somehow diminished?
No.
Our work may express something of who we are, but it does not measure our worth.
You are not infinitely precious because you are productive.
You are not unconditionally loved because you performed well today.
You are not more valuable because someone praised your work or less valuable because someone criticized it.
Your preciousness comes first.
The work follows.
Being where we are
To inhabit work is not simply to do more work.
In fact, inhabiting work may be the opposite of becoming consumed by it.
It is possible to disappear into our tasks—to move endlessly from one thing to the next, always trying to reach whatever comes after this moment.
We wash the dishes so we can sit down.
We rush through an email so we can get to the next one.
We half-listen to the person on the phone while thinking about the three other things still waiting for us.
But inhabiting work means arriving where we are.
When I am washing the dish, I am washing the dish.
When I am walking, I am walking.
When I am speaking with a neighbor, I am with that neighbor.
When I am recording a podcast, I am here recording the podcast.
That last one became especially real for me while preparing this episode. I recorded it once and, when I listened back, realized that I had not really inhabited the work. My attention had wandered into too many other places.
That was not something to condemn myself for.
It was simply something to notice.
And noticing gave me the opportunity to return.
What are we carrying into the moment?
We bring ourselves into everything we do.
Sometimes that means we bring kindness, curiosity, creativity, patience, or love.
Sometimes we bring irritation.
Maybe three things have gone wrong before the phone rings. I answer, and there is an edge in my voice that really has nothing to do with the person calling.
What I am carrying from one moment begins to spill into another.
Part of inhabiting work is becoming aware of what is moving through us into the world.
What am I bringing to this conversation?
What am I bringing to this email?
What am I bringing to this room?
Not as a way of judging ourselves.
Simply as awareness.
There are places for anger, weariness, disappointment, joy, frustration, and everything else that arises within us. But being present means noticing when something from another place is beginning to take over this one.
Then, perhaps, we can return.
Practice with something small
We do not have to begin with the biggest or most important work in our lives.
We can begin with a dish.
The next time you wash something by hand, see if you can simply be there.
Feel the water.
Notice your hands.
Notice the movement.
For that moment, the dish does not have to be something you get through so you can reach the next thing.
This is where you are.
Or notice yourself while brushing your teeth.
Vacuuming the floor.
Walking down a hallway.
Writing an email.
Talking with someone you love.
Can you be there?
Not perfectly.
Not as another spiritual achievement.
Just present enough to notice the life you are actually living while you are living it.
And when the work is finished, perhaps another part of inhabiting work is knowing how to lay it down.
There will almost always be something left undone.
Another email.
Another call.
Another task for tomorrow.
Can the work be something we take up fully, inhabit while we are there, and then release when it is time to be somewhere else?
Can we be here when we are here—and elsewhere when we are elsewhere?
That, too, is part of inhabiting our lives.
Our work matters.
It carries something of us into the world.
But it is not who we are, and it is never the measure of our worth.
So today, perhaps the invitation is simply this:
Bring yourself to what you are doing.
Let the inner life have hands.
Be present as best you can.
And whether you manage that beautifully, imperfectly, or hardly at all, remember:
You are infinitely precious and unconditionally loved for the gift you already are.
