First Principle: Work is
Prayerful
Where do you want to go?"
"I don't know."
"Then, any direction will do."
— Alice and the Mad Hatter
Clump clump, clump ... pat, pat, pat. We were awakened by the hurried sound of big feet and the catch-up sound of little feet over our heads. More footsteps followed like an audio version of Goldilocks — Daddy Bear, Mamma Bear, and three Baby Bears. We laughed as we envisioned the drama unfolding upstairs. With each passing minute, the tempo of the footsteps picked up until big feet stomped and little feet ran. Then, with the slam of a door and the whir of an auto engine, the house fell silent. "Whew," my wife said to me, "they made it again."
We had just listened to the sounds of our son's family getting ready for work and school. To accommodate us when we visit him, he had built a brand-new parent's room in his basement. Always before, we had stayed in a second-floor bedroom and had missed the early morning drama. Both he and his wife work, two older children are in grade school, and the youngest is in preschool. Every morning, then, is a race against time and a test of family organization. Until we heard the sounds above, we had not realized how fast the modern family
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has to move under pressure.
Does the story sound familiar? My guess is that each of us identifies with the sound and sometimes the fury of our families getting ready for work and school. Noticeably missing in the fast-moving drama is the interlude of quiet time for prayer in preparation for the work of the day. Of course, we heard all feet stop for a brief blessing at breakfast, but then the anxious tapping began again during hurried bites and took on the sound of a stampede from the table to the bathroom and out the door.
PRAYER AS PREPARATION FOR OUR WORK
Modern life militates against prayer as preparation for our daily work. Now that our household is an empty nest, I find time for solitude and spiritual reflection in the morning. When our four children were home, however, my morning model for the children was "prayer on the run." Sometimes during the day they might see me along with my Bible, and we finally settled on Sunday night as the time reserved for family prayer. During the week, our regular prayer time fell during the pre-meal moments when we tried to gather the family at our round table for dinner.
Prayer on the run is no substitute for the "brooding time" which preceded God's creative work in the Genesis story. When I was in the busy work cycle with my family, I remember the comfort I received from the title of Malcom Boyd's book, Are You Running With Me, Jesus? The title implies the speed of our spiritual activism which requires Jesus to run and catch up. Of course, this is nothing more than a show of spiritual arrogance. Yet, I bought into the idea because I needed to justify my lack of "brooding time" alone with God. I remember rationalizing my prayerlessness by contending that "prayer on the run" for a Christian college president doing the Lord's work was just as good as "prayer before the run." Also, I hid behind the weak
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excuse that the "quality of prayer" was more important than the "quantity of prayer." Neither excuse holds water. I still pray on the run, but those petitions are usually spotty and self-serving. If only I had followed God's example of "brooding time" long ago, my daily work would have been more effective and my spiritual growth would have been greater.
The monastic fathers disciplined their daily lives according to the Latin motto laborare est orare, or "to work is to pray." After early hours of meditation, they went to a full day of menial labor and then returned to evening prayers before retiring for the night. Spiritually, however, their prayers were primary. They worked only for sustenance; true spirituality came through the discipline of their devotions. During the hours when they worked, they continued in the attitude of prayerful discipline.
Prayer in the Creation Ethic is different. According to Genesis 1:2, the Spirit "brooded" over the dark waters and the empty earth. Because brooding is a form of prayer, the motto of the monks, laborare est orare, might well be applied to the Creation Ethic. But there is an essential difference. For the monastic fathers, prayer had spiritual priority over work; for the Spirit of God in Creation, prayerful planning served as preparation for effective work. Neither praying nor doing had priority. Each had spiritual value of its own. Let's look at some of the ways that prayer prepares us for our daily work.
PRAYER AS PERSPECTIVE FOR OUR WORK
Prayer prepares us for our daily work by giving us perspective. Daily labor has a way of engaging the mind and spirit so thoroughly that we can become obsessed with our tasks. The results can be detrimental to our person as well as to our work. For instance, our work suffers from the "law of diminishing returns" because details overwhelm us. Also, our sense of personal worth
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suffers because our worth is too closely tied to our work.
In his book Modern Madness: The Emotional Fallout of Success, Douglas LaBier notes an increasing tendency for people to bind together their personal identity with their professional career. "Indeed," he writes, "they are almost equivalent."1 But people who identify too closely with their work lose their objectivity and see every problem on the job as either a threat or an enhancement of their self-image. In severe cases, the ensuing stress may lead to psychological anxiety, physical illness, or social conflicts.
In a Psychology Today article entitled, "Is Your Job Driving You Crazy?" Ronni Sandroff lists some of the risks of identifying too closely with our jobs and taking ourselves too seriously.2 In one way or another, every one of us can find ourselves on the list.
Clergy: Supreme Self-Denial — developing a distorted view of self-sacrifice which causes us to ignore our own needs and fail with others.
Police Officer: Rambo Complex — being unable to admit fears and vulnerabilities.
Teachers: Submissive Savant — exaggerating their own powerlessness and fear of confronting authority.
Lawyers: Verdict Vertigo — crumbling under the weight of responsibility and fear of making a mistake.
Dentists: Psychic Cavities — focusing upon technical skills, but having trouble with people, particularly their own families.
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Government Workers: Uncle Sam Syndrome — developing lethargic, automaton behavior.
Computer Programmers: Techno-Personality — finding human beings frustrating because they're too hard too fix.
Performers: Hamlet's Doubt — after gaining public acclaim, they still have the empty feeling, "Is this all?"
Politicians: Image Attachment — believing their own propaganda and the images they project to the public.
Physicians: M.D.-eity Syndrome — failing in battle against pain, disease and death, their idealism suffers.
Therapists: Pernicious Ph.D.-eity — running the risk of becoming grandiose as they have trouble dropping their interpretative and restrained professional role.
Air Traffic Controllers: Quick Fixers — expressing discomfort with the ambiguities of human situations.
Stock Brokers: Money Mania — falling into the habit of spending money as the way of expressing themselves.
Each of us can add to the list. When we lose the "white space" between our identity and our work, we become miserable
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and boring persons whom others want to avoid. When we take ourselves too seriously and lose our identity in our work, we have no room to change, stretch, grow, or flex, either on the job or as persons.
"Brooding time" in prayer keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously. When we pray, we step back from our daily work and into the setting where we are all alone with God — very small in His presence, but very significant as eternal and total beings in comparison with the temporary and partial nature of our jobs. At one and the same time, we see our work as infinitely meaningful and patently absurd. To realize that we are cocreators with God gives our daily work infinite meaning, to realize how small a difference our work will make in the history of the world lets us laugh at ourselves. Senator Sam Ervin, Chairman of the Senate Committee investigating the Watergate scandal, was asked if he was ready for such a crucial and controversial role. Ervin answered, "I've been preparing all of my life for this moment." With humility and humor, then, he brought an objectivity to his chairmanship that kept him from grandstanding and left everyone with the impression that he was wise and fair with all parties. As we know, Sam Ervin was a man who knew the value of "brooding time" in prayer.
Each day, then, we need to prepare for work with prayer. Such a discipline is not only spiritually sound, but is also mentally necessary. Experts in time management recommend daily "brooding" as preparation for effective work. A simple technique of listing tasks to be done and then sorting them out according to their priorities:
urgent and essential
timely and important
long-range and optional
restores perspective to our work and multiplies our efficiency. Even when our work plan is upset by interruptions, we retain our perspective. Henri Nouwen, the professor-priest, tells of resenting students who interrupted his scholarly writing until
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one day he realized that the students were the reason for his calling to teaching. From that perspective he said, "Interruptions are my business."3
In one way or another, each of us needs to set a schedule of "brooding time" in preparation for our daily work. My pattern involves solitary time both morning and night. Late every night, I jog along the nearly abandoned streets in our village. I am so regular on the run that students of the seminary have nicknamed me "The Midnight Strider." They know that I want to be alone, I need the time to regain my perspective. No Walkman fills my ears with the sound of music or teaching tapes. The built-in recorder of my brain frees my mind from the clutter of the day and prepares me for the work load of tomorrow. The first ten minutes or so is "sorting time." I store extraneous events of the day in the memory bank of "Things to Forget," including failures, criticisms, and hurts which are not worth either a response or a continuing memory. One of the most significant phrases that I recall speaking to myself after weighing a personal grievance is, "It's not worth my time or energy. I have more important things to do."
Eighteen to twenty minutes into my jogging I experience the "runner's high." Whether it is physiological or psychological, it translates into a spiritual experience for me. After reaching that high, I have not only put my daily work back into the perspective of my spiritual calling, but have had unforgettable moments of "creative breakthroughs" with solutions to problems, outline for speeches, and imaginative thoughts for long-range planning. Most important of all, at least for me, my anxiety about the future is lifted and I return home to sleep with the "sweet amen of peace."
In those memorable moments, I feel a kinship with the Spirit of God who "brooded" over the dark waters and empty earth before proceeding with His creative work. Chaos, darkness, and emptiness characterize my world as well. Without
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"brooding time" and prayer with God alone, the world is too much for me. But if I step back and gain the perspective of prayer, I see the creative potential in my work for order to come from chaos, light from darkness, and fullness from emptiness.
PRAYER AS PLANNING FOR OUR WORK
With the perspective of brooding prayer, the Spirit of God turned from an architect to an engineer. An architect is a designer who works from an artist's perspective, an engineer is a detailer who works with a technicians's precision. Most people are one or the other, either a designer or a detailer. The most creative person I have known, however, combined the two. Ed Wells is best known as the ingenious man who engineered the breakthroughs in succeeding generations of Boeing Aircraft. He is a stickler for details and rigidly obedient to the laws of physics and aerodynamics. Ed brings that same discipline to his avocational love of oil painting. Yet, his art is as creative as his aircraft. In describing his work, he speaks about the precision of planning the design, mixing the colors, and laying out the painting. But once his brush touches the canvas he is set free. Form, line, and color come together in an artistic creation that is very good and very valuable. It all begins with the detailed planning of brooding time.
Between the lines of the Genesis story, we can imagine the mind of the Spirit at work with thoughts of creating order out of chaos, turning darkness to light, and changing emptiness to fullness.
Order is created by a grand ecological design in which everything is connected with everything else and all is centered in God, light is the generating force for living and growing beings, and fullness is the totality of minerals, vegetables, and animal life crowned by human beings created in the "image of God."
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Our work will take on similar designs and dimensions in creative thought during our brooding times when the Spirit moves upon our minds and hearts as He did over the dark waters of the unformed earth. Each morning I lay out my daily work before God and ask that He do His brooding once again so that my plans coincide with the "strategy of the Spirit." Failure to follow this spiritual discipline takes me into the "strategy of self" which might include plans to attack enemies, ploys for winning against competitors, or patterns of random action without a clear sense of direction.
No matter what the nature of our work, we need to plan in prayer. On a typical day we each face decisions which affect the quality of our work — tasks that are too big for us, people who are too difficult for us, and problems that are too complicated for us. For each of these, we need preventive prayer which gives us a sense of who we are and of where we are going. Planning each day through the discipline of prayer will keep us on track and carry us through the inevitable highs and lows of our daily work.
PRAYER AS ENERGY FOR OUR WORK
Another advantage comes from prayer as preparation for our daily work. Perspective gives us a "big picture" of the work to be done and planning breaks down major projects into manageable tasks. Together, then, perspective and planning bring our diverse energies into high-intensity focus. In the oft-quoted Scripture, we say "The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much" (James 5:16). This passage is more than a prooftext for the results of prayer. We may miss the point that effective and fervent are adjectives describing the nature of prayer. Without violence to the text, we might also describe the prayer that avails much as focused and energized. When we do, our understanding of the verse is assisted by the laws of physics. Whenever
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light or heat is focused with high intensity, the results can be a laser beam that has power to pierce steel or a nuclear bomb that can obliterate cities. Wind that is focused has similar energy. When a low-pressure frontal system penetrates a high-pressure area, the power of the wind at the point of penetration has tornado force.
Pinpoint prayer has the same power. When we prepare for our daily work through the discipline of prayer, all of our energies are focused upon the task and energized by the power of concentration. Eastern gurus, New Age cultists, and motivational therapists have tried to capitalized on this principle of prayer through such techniques as meditation, visioning, and centering. Certainly they have succeeded from the human standpoint, because the principle is psychological as well as spiritual. Yet they are limited to the natural dimensions of the practice. Only prayer which focuses body, mind, and soul on God, and submits to His will, has the energy of divine and human power which can move mountains and make miracles.
When we fail to pray, however, our perspective for work narrows. Our plans for work give way to chaos and our energy for work is drained. We need to brood over our daily tasks with focused and energized prayer if we want our work to be creative.
Experience has taught me that I can miss my nightly jogging for three days before I notice personal fatigue, muscular regression, and loss of body tone. The discipline of prayer, however does not afford me the same luxury, for there is a direct and immediate effect between my life of prayer and my life of work. If I miss my solitude in prayer either in the morning or evening, my outlook changes, my energy lags, and my work suffers.
None of us can afford to begin our daily work without brooding time in prayer. The Creation story tells us why. Without this brooding time in the presence of God to know the mind
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of the Spirit and the Word of Christ, our daily work will be like the heavens and the earth in the beginning — dark, empty,and chaotic.
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SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS
ON OUR WORK AND PRAYER
For we are His workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God
prepared beforehand that we should walk
in them.
Ephesians 2:10
* * * * * * *
A PROVOCATIVE QUESTION
Do you have daily "brooding time" when you practice the discipline of prayer? What time is best for you? What disciplines do you practice? Have you found a direct connection between the regularity of your "brooding time," the quality of your work, and the evidence of your spiritual growth?
A PRACTICAL EXERCISE
Make a prayer list which identifies the critical aspects of your daily work. Include your relationships, your work environment, and the tasks you must do. Then, pray for a new attitude, new energy, and new results in your daily work.
A PERSONAL PRAYER
Father, forgive me for substituting "busy work" for "brooding time" as the way to do Your will. Amen.
Chapter Five || Table of Contents
1. Douglas LaBier, Modern Madness: The Emotional Fallout of Success (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1986), 26.
2. Ronni Sandroff, "Is Your Job Driving You Crazy?" Psychology Today (July/August 1989) 42-44).
3. Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1986), 52.
