Whack-a-mole

Have you ever felt like this cat?

Life is moving at warp speed and little things keep popping up faster than you can smoosh them back down. Meanwhile, the big things are looming as you fight the distractions each day, seemingly keeping you from where you want to be.

I’d venture to guess that if you are human and you have a pulse, you can relate.

I want you to stop playing whack-a-mole, because I believe that in order to see and hear the story God is writing in your life, it requires that we quiet our minds enough to notice it.

Why does this matter for our work?

Roughly one-third of our life is spent at work and for most, work takes up 50%+ of our waking hours for the majority of our careers.

I’ll ask this question.

How often do you have the time to pause and think at work?

If your experience is anything like mine, I rarely feel like I have the time I want or need to truly work at my best.

Let’s be honest, nobody wants you to pause and think. Furthermore, nobody wants you to pause and invite God into your decisions. Or at least, that’s how it seems.

But yet, the Lord says to “Trust in Him with all your heart, and don’t lean on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight (Proverbs 3:5-6).

If we want to unlock flourishing in and through our work, we MUST develop the skill of hearing God’s voice.

As you well know, life isn’t going to slow down. In fact, it only speeds up, and on top of that, the stakes only get higher as it accelerates! Which is why cultivating our ability to see God’s hand in our story is a skill we can’t afford to miss.

For each of the next three weeks I’m going to provide a quote, or a passage from scripture, and ask you to sit with it. I’ll provide a few thoughts or prompts to help, but I won’t have a punchline or key takeaway for you. That will be yours to discover with God.

So let’s dig in!

If you haven’t read With, by Skye Jethani, I recommend adding it to your list. He breaks down four wrong, or incomplete, approaches to our relationship with God, which you can explore in the book.

For the purposes of today, I’ll focus on what Jethani calls the “Life for God” posture, and a quote from that section I want you to wrestle with. First, here’s a definition you can use for a Life for God mentality.

Life for God is "this most celebrated of religious postures", it holds that the most significant life is the one spent accomplishing great things in God's service.

In summary, these are the Christians with incredible resumes and whose accolades are too many to list.

Okay, with the Life for God context in mind, I invite you to read the quote below and to pause for a moment to consider what Jethani’s lament stirs up in your heart.

Take your time, and read it a few times.

Once you’ve done that, here are a few questions to think about.

What role have they played in your life?

No explanation needed here.

A.W. Toser says, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

I won’t say much about this question, but I give you Toser’s quote to encourage you NOT to toss this question out.

My final encouragement is to be patient. If you uncover something big this week, that’s amazing, but I’d encourage you to hold it loosely. If something big hits you after three weeks, I’d say the same. God rarely microwaves his most important messages for us.

If by the end of these three weeks, you’ve developed the beginnings of a habit to slow down and listen, that is the win we are after!

As always, please respond to this email if you’d like to chat and discuss anything from this or other posts! And if you have any friends who you think might derive value from exploring Wholehearted Work - I’d love for you to share it with them.

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With Heart,

Alex