But something went wrong along the way. Unlike God in his work of creation, our work fails us, and we fail our work. Due to lack of motivation and skill and capacity, we struggle to produce the kind of work that will truly satisfy us. Even with our best work, the enjoyment gets ruined when someone or something comes along and ruins it. Cars break down, children choose foolishly, parishioners sin against God and each other, lawns grow weeds, roofs leak, food spoils, investments flop, and the best books don’t get read.
There are theological reasons for this reality. Ever since Adam and Eve sought independence from God, work, just like every other good thing in God’s creation, has been under a curse. God said to Adam:
Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it…thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you…by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground. (Genesis 3:17-19)
Because of this cosmic curse, even people with the best jobs experience frustration and anticlimax in their work. Always seeming to envision more than we are able to accomplish, we become stuck…stuck between our innate, primal need to work and an inability to do it well and to sustain it for the long haul.
In a sense, we are all like Sisyphus, the Greek mythological character, whose story doesn’t seem like a myth at all. Because of selfish ambition and deceitfulness, Sisyphus was condemned to eternal punishment. His sentence consisted of rolling a large rock to the top of a hill. Once he got close to the top, the rock would roll back down the hill. For the rest of eternity, he was doomed to repeat this frustrating task.
One time JRR Tolkein wrote a similar story to help him process his own frustration with work. The story, Leaf by Niggle, was about an artist who had been commissioned to paint a mural on the side of city hall. Niggle spent the rest of his career attempting to complete that mural, a large and colorful tree that would inspire for years to come. But in the end, the artist was only able to eek out a single leaf. And then he died. On the train to heaven, Niggle saw a vague but familiar image in the distance. He asked the conductor to stop the train, and so the train stopped. Niggle got off the train and, as he approached the object, discovered that it was a tree—his tree—complete and more lovely than he had imagined. And there, in the middle of the tree, was his contribution—Niggle’s leaf for the whole world to see. In the end, Niggle discovers that all of it, the tree and even his single leaf, is a gift.
I’m told that Tolkein wrote this short story as a way of processing his frustration with another work of his, one that he had spent years of his life creating but was convinced would never be seen or appreciated by anyone. The name of that frustrating work? Lord of the Rings.
When my friend Brian, a professional writer, was dying from cancer in his mid-thirties, I asked him what he looked forward to the most in the New Heaven and New Earth. Do you know what he said? He said that the thing he looks forward to the most is having no more writer’s block.
Scripture promises, “no eye has seen, no ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). It also promises that the good work he has begun in us, every good work—whether it be the work of becoming more like Jesus in our character, or the work of painting just a leaf when we dream of a tree—the God who is both Creator and Restorer, and the Architect and Builder of his great city—will be faithful to complete that work (Philippians 1:6). And as he completes that work, he will also look to us through the finished work of Jesus and say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23).
The work you do now will go on into eternity. It’s a leaf on the Creator’s tree. Don’t ever forget that you are putting a man on the moon and you are making history.
And please, whatever you do, never say “just.”
This article about all work being God’s work originallyl appeared here, and is used by permission.
