10 WAYS TO FIND HOLINESS IN YOUR JOB

Do you consider your job holy?

If it’s honest work, the answer is “yes” but finding out why – and how – is not always easy. There are some professions in which the connection to God, holiness, and goodness is apparent. But what if you’re flipping burgers, cashing checks or fixing people’s plumbing? Where’s God in this work? Or what happens when, in the daily grind, you lose sight of how your job is holy? Here are few ways to find – or rediscover – the holiness in what you do.

1. SEE JESUS IN EACH PERSON YOU ENCOUNTER, AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, You did for Me,” Jesus says (Matthew 25:40)

2. P RAY Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, found his former task of helping poor people find jobs boring until his spiritual director suggested he pray about it. Upon doing so, he found himself weeping out of compassion for one of his clients. Father Jim writes, “I was much more aware of God’s presence in her.”

3. S EE THE BIG PICTURE Your job may not be glamorous, but it has an important function nonetheless. For example, maybe you work in billing for a utility company. In doing your job, you support a company that brings light and energy to thousands of homes and businesses, making it possible for them to do their own necessary work.

4. K EEP A JOURNAL In our most stressful and frustrating moments, it’s easy to see only the negative about our jobs – the critical boss, the rude customer, the unrewarding paycheck. At these times, a job can seem more hellish than holy.

5. R EMEMBER THAT LITTLE THINGS COUNT. “It is not the magnitude of our actions,” said Mother Teresa, “but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.” In the course of your day you may have only small ways to influence others – a smile and a kind word for a customer, giving a hand to an overburdened colleague, holding the door for a stranger who works in the same building. But one gesture can make a world of difference.

6. F OCUS ON THE BRIGHT SIDE. Even if your job has little to offer in the way of creativity, satisfaction, or genial colleagues, consider what it does provide. For example, benefits to cover a spouse or child’s medical expenses. Providing for our families is certainly a holy task, and honest work that enables that support is holy in its own right.

7. S TAY IN THE MOMENT. “Life can be found only in the present moment,” says Buddhist teacher. We can enjoy our work more fully – and better appreciate its holiness – if we are mindful of each task we do.

8. G ET A NEW PERSPECTIVE How have people in various professions made your day better or changed your life?

9. H AVE A GOOD ATTITUDE Ask yourself, “What can I give to this job?” rather than simply, “What can I get from it?” Looking for ways that your skills, personality, and talents can benefit others is a great way to stay in touch with the holiness of your work. The same goes for your goals.

Being so self focused may render you less likely to enjoy the present and make loving choices in your job than a goal like, “Helping people make good financial decisions.”

10. D O YOUR JOB WELL. “The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter,” apologist Dorothy Sayers wrote in Creed or Chaos?,” is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.” We are not called to be good aside from our work, but through our work. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical “Laborem Exercens” (“On Human Work ”),

“ Work is a good thing for man – a good things for humanity – because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more a human being.”’’ Let us then see our work for what it is – as an opportunity to grow in holiness and to love one another as God loves us.