“This place really drags a person down.”

A co-worker, and friend, said that to me today. And I couldn’t have put it better. I’ve thought about a lot of jobs, and agree with him when it concerns this one.

To all of you who have a job that you love, or who work for yourself, or who are full-time writers, musicians, artists, etc. I congratulate you, and am proud of you. And I really hope that doing what you love (and getting paid for it) doesn’t drag you down. Or if it does, that you remember that it could be a lot worse.

I don’t enjoy the kind of work I do right now at all.

But I’m okay with that. I still follow Jesus with joy, and know that I can do all things through him. He strengthens me. (Norman Vincent Peale misused that quote quite often.)

My job challenges my faith.  It invites me to despise the people (the customers) that I have to talk to,  one after the other, day after day.  Those who I call in my heart “selfish,” who insult you, deride you, degrade you, and treat you more like a machine than a human.

It’s wrong.

My faith tells me to love people.   And my experience at work incites me to hatred.

Maybe that’s something I can learn from working a job like this.  Humility.  Patience.  Taking crap when you need to.  Finding joy in God in the midst of bad situations.

It’d be great to be independently wealthy.  I wouldn’t object.  It’d be really nice to be abundant and not have to deal with what I deal with daily.  It’s not fun to listen to customers put the blame of a whole corporation on your shoulders when their service is interrupted.  It’s not healthy for the soul.

You feel like you’re being ground into the dirt.

And it challenges my faith.

God hates this system.  The whole world system is satanic (adversarial).  It accuses your faith in Christ, who is the living image of a new way of life, adversarial itself to the ways of this world.

When we’re all caught up in this system, it’s good to remember that our sustenance does not come from our corporate, wage-slave jobs.

Our sustenance comes from God.

So don’t make an idol out of your work.  Don’t make decisions about your life as a slave to your job, thinking that there’s no other way to do things.

God is the way. He is your provider.

Work, and trust in God.

But those who know God hate this system.  God isn’t in it.  He isn’t honored in it.

God doesn’t want us to hate the world: the rivers, the lakes, the forests.  We’re to be stewards of such.

But he who loves this system, this way of treating people, this way of grinding souls into a mill of corporate advancement and material gain: he who loves this system cannot love God.

So work, if you have to – if you find yourself in this system.  Work to provide for yourself and the ones you love.

But make sure you’re only in the system.  And not of it.