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I first realized this about a month after I started the job. I was sitting across the table from one of my coolest coworkers—the one who used to work for The New Yorker, the one with the to-die-for purple fishnet tights, the one I most desperately hoped would like me. And I knew she knew I was a Christian. I was convinced she wouldn't befriend me.

It turned out that Ms. Fishnet is a bigger person than I am; it's true that she doesn't have many evangelical friends, but it's also true that my faith didn't put her off, and whatever hang-ups I have about it are just that—my hang-ups, my embarrassment, my discomfort, my sophisticated cynicism getting in the way.

Embarrassment may not be the only reason I shy away from declaring my Christian commitments. Once, about two months after I started my job, I was kibitzing with some coworkers about men: I allowed as how I had met this really cute Indian guy at a party, and that this reportedly good kisser had asked me out for the next weekend.

"Toeing to the Christian straight and narrow?" my coworker teased. "Aren't y'all supposed to be chaste, and only date Christians to boot?" I was horrified. I felt like that character from the recently canceled sitcom Kristin. I understood that I was going to have to hold myself to some higher standard, that I was representing not just myself but also the gospel.

Maybe my presence in the office taught some of my coworkers about Christianity; I don't really know. I do know that it taught me something about Christianity.

And I didn't pray very often, or keep up with my spiritual director. After all, I reasoned, I was spending all day doing things related to religion. I was writing term papers for my classes on the history of American Protestantism, and I was editing all these religion book reviews. My whole life was religion. Who needed prayer?

One week, a bumper crop of books about the Lord's Prayer crossed my desk. I took them home, stacked them on my bedside table, and began working through them, pen in hand, every night before I went to sleep. Four days later, as I was reading an insightful passage about forgiving others' trespasses, I realized I hadn't actually talked—or listened—to God since I got those books. Reading about prayer was easier than doing it.

I continue to believe that we find God in our vocations, whether or not those vocations have anything explicitly to do with religion. But I now see that finding God at the office is, for me, icing, and it has to be spread over a dense layer of finding him in the more traditional places—in the pew and on my knees.

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November 12 2001, Vol. 45, No. 14