Labor

Somewhere between the hustle culture sermons about “grinding for the Kingdom” and your boss passive-aggressively emailing you at 10 p.m. with a “quick question,” the idea of actual, soul-filling rest has been lost.

Rest isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. A spiritual, emotional, and even physical game-changer that modern life is actively working against. We treat it like a reward for productivity, something we “earn” by checking enough boxes. But that’s not how it works. If you only allow yourself to rest when you’ve run out of energy, you’re not actually resting. You’re recovering from burnout.

For a generation that’s really into “self-care,” we sure are bad at resting. We schedule vacations that are more exhausting than our regular lives and take “Sabbath” as an excuse to binge entire seasons of prestige TV in one sitting.

The Bible starts with God creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh—not because he was tired but because he was setting the rhythm. Rest wasn’t an afterthought. It was built into creation itself.

Jesus followed that rhythm too. He regularly stepped away from crowds, left people hanging (yes, really) and took time alone to pray. If the literal Savior of the world wasn’t available 24/7, why do we think we need to be?

Here’s the thing: rest isn’t just good for your soul. It’s good for your brain. Studies show that chronic stress literally rewires your brain, making it harder to focus, regulate emotions, and be productive in the long run.

The world thrives on keeping you busy. Consumerism, capitalism, and even some versions of church culture—there’s always something else to achieve. But choosing rest? That’s countercultural.

So, take a real Sabbath. Put your phone in another room. Go outside. Breathe. Let yourself rest. Because you don’t need to “earn” it. In fact, you were created for it.

You know how it is. Saturday is a blissful day. You get some exercise. Do chores around the house. Spend time with family, friends, and/or pets. You go out Saturday night. And then, it’s Sunday morning. And you know that Sunday leads inevitably to Monday. And on Monday that to-do list will rear its head again. Suddenly, you want to bury your head under your pillow and hope it all goes away.

The cloud of dread hanging over you on Sunday evening; the wave of anxious anticipation you feel ahead of a new week; the cold sweat you get thinking about Monday. These feelings have a name: the “Sunday scaries.” From worry to being overwhelmed to straight-up sadness, these feelings are depressingly common. Several factors are thought to cause the Sunday scaries such as economic uncertainty, burnout, fear of losing a job, and reflection on whether working so hard at a job is worthwhile.

LinkedIn surveyed 2,000 U.S. workers and found that 75% experience Sunday scaries. And while it may seem like workers have long-dreaded the end of the weekend, LinkedIn’s research suggests that the extent to which workers currently experience the Sunday scaries is on the rise.

You may think you have the worst job in America—but are you always on call and facing a deadline, working in a high-stress environment, all for very little pay? Do you routinely work outdoors on the hottest and coldest days of the year? Does your work constantly put you at risk of severe injury or death? Is there no opportunity for skill development? If not, you probably don't have one of the worst jobs."

Using a complex algorithm that measures salary, job outlook, work environment, and stress (like the stress of slicing your hand off, being kicked by a cow, or getting crushed by a falling pine tree), they ranked the jobs from best to worst.

Here are some of non-dream jobs that were on the list of the lowest-ranked jobs in America:

#15 - Butcher

#14 - Coal miner

#13 - Janitor

#12 - Dishwasher

#11 - Roofer

#10 - Meter Reader

#09 - Dairy Farmer

#08 - Oil Rig Worker

#07 - Security Guard

#06 - Lumberjack

#05 - Telemarketer

The four worst jobs in the US in 2024, ranked in descending order #4 to #1:

#04 - Waiter

#03 - Hospital Orderlies

#02 - Welder

#01 - Assembly worker

Possible Preaching Angles:

Work; Vocation; Career — (1) Start a sermon or sermon series on work by using this illustration to stress that all jobs have challenges, but some jobs have more challenges than others. (2) Talk about finding dignity and satisfaction in our jobs even if they aren't glamorous, since most of us aren't in the top-ranked jobs. (3) Be thankful for your job and grateful for people who provide services we need. After all, you probably don't have to worry about a tree falling on you.

Yuta Sakamoto was exhausted from selling home-improvement projects, including the boss’s demand that he help clean up at renovation sites on weekends. One day, he mustered his courage and announced he wanted to quit. But his boss warned him he would be ruining his future, and Sakamoto shrank back.

Then a friend proposed a solution. Sakamoto didn’t have to confront the boss again—he could hire someone to do it for him. After sending $200 and his case details to a quitting agency, he was finally a free man.

“I would have been mentally broken if I had continued,” says 24-year-old Sakamoto, who found a new job as a salesman at a printing firm.

A labor shortage in Japan means underpaid or overworked employees have other options nowadays. The problem: this famously polite country has a lot of people who hate confrontation. Some worry they’ll cause a disruption by leaving, or they dread the idea of co-workers gossiping about what just transpired in the boss’s office.

Enter a company called Exit. Toshiyuki Niino co-founded it to help people quit after experiencing his own difficulties in leaving jobs. “Americans may be surprised, but I was too shy or too scared to say what I think,” says Niino, 34. “Japanese are not educated to debate and express opinions.” Exit now handles more than 10,000 cases a year in which its staff quits on behalf of clients.

Possible Preaching Angles:

There are several approaches you might take with this story: 1) Fear and Courage – Learning how to overcome fear with faith and courage (2 Tim. 1:7); 2) Work Ethic – Finding a career that fits with our skills and well-being (Col. 3:23); Wisdom and Guidance – Sakamoto’s friend suggesting the use of a quitting agency illustrates seeking counsel from others when making decisions (Prov. 11:14).

Bonnie Hammer started her career in 1974 as a bottom-rung production assistant to the top of NBC Universal’s headquarters. As of 2024 she had become a Vice President. She advises younger workers to resist the lies about work, like “follow your dreams.” Instead, she shares a story about humility and hard work:

I learned my ‘workplace worth’ fresh out of graduate school when I was hired as a production assistant on a kids’ TV show in Boston. Each PA was assigned a cast member, and as the most junior employee, my cast member was Winston, an English sheepdog. My primary responsibility was to follow him around the set carrying a pooper scooper. I had two university degrees. Winston, on the other hand, was a true nepo-baby, the precious, unhouse-trained pet of one of the show’s producers. Plus, as an on-camera star, Winston out-earned me.

But while many days I felt like working for Winston was beneath me, I never showed it. I acted like I was pursuing an honors degree in pet sitting, and each poop pickup was an extra-credit opportunity. The work and the attitude paid off. When an associate producer position opened, I was promoted. I pursued a similar strategy for much of my early career: If I wanted to be a valuable asset to my colleagues and bosses, I knew I needed to add concrete value to their days by showing up, staying late and doing whatever needed to be done.

For young employees who want to feel ‘engaged’ at work, the truth is, you need to engage with your work first.

In 2023 the ad agency Design Army created an entire campaign using only generative AI. In it, a world of impossible buildings, floating hats, and gigantic eyeballs announces the opening of a high-end eyewear retailer.

As Design Army cofounder Pum Lefebure explained, “in a typical project like this, we would hire models, makeup artists, and wardrobe specialists, scout and secure shoot locations, and ultimately it would take at least three months to execute.” But the budget was tight and time was short, so they turned to AI. Though there’s a touch of uncanny valley in the resulting imagery, the visuals are impressive.

Always aiming for faster output and grander scale, leaders across industries are excited about the potential for this new tech. But AI technology raises real concerns for the creatives whose original work could be replaced or copied by these tools.

Creativity is an essential part of who we are as human beings. In the creation narrative, when the first human is tasked with cultivating the Garden (Gen. 2:5–8, 15), we see that making is a God-given privilege and responsibility. It’s a calling generative AI threatens to undermine. We are robbing ourselves of this gift of toil—the creative process of ideating, developing, and producing—when we take too many shortcuts or automate our work.

As the opening lines of Genesis make clear, right after God completes the aspects of creation that he alone is capable of, he invites humankind to pick up where he left off. For example, God doesn’t create all of humanity in an instant; he makes only two humans and then tasks them with making more of themselves through bearing children and forming families.

To accomplish these tasks, God didn’t give humans his unique power to generate new things simply by speaking them into existence. He gave humans the purpose of joining in the ongoing work of creation. We see this again and again throughout the biblical story line. He tasks humankind with making things themselves (Ex. 31:1­-11; 1 Sam. 16:16–18). It is in God’s generosity that we are handed the paintbrush and invited to join the process.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God uses the trials, tedium, mistakes, victories, and lessons of life to refine us into the image of Christ. It is not done in an instant, however much we want to rush to the final result. It is through an often-lengthy process that we become who God intended us to be and our work becomes what God ordained.

Business consultants are calling it “The 85% rule.” An article in The Wall Street Journal explained how it works:

Are you giving it your all? Maybe that’s too much. So many of us were raised in the gospel of hard work and max effort, taught that what we put in was what we got out. Now, some coaches and corporate leaders have a new message. To be at your best, dial it back a bit.

Trying to run at top speed will actually lead to slower running times, they say, citing fitness research. Lifting heavy weights until you absolutely can’t anymore won’t spark more muscle gain than stopping a little sooner, said one exercise physiologist.

The trick—be it in exercise, or anything—is to try for 85%. Aiming for perfection often makes us feel awful, burns us out and backfires. Instead, count the fact that you hit eight out of 10 of your targets this quarter as a win. We don’t need to see our work, health, or hobbies as binary objectives, perfected or a total failure.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Interestingly, if you truly remember the Sabbath—one day out of seven—that equals 85.7% of your week devoted to work. So, the Sabbath was God’s original 85% rule.

Should consumers who worry about the origins of their clothing, coffee, and chocolate focus on a more spiritual item: the Bible? Chances are good that your favorite Bible was printed in China. The over-whelming majority of Bibles sold are printed there, said Mark Bertrand of Bible Design Blog. He said: “A lot of people have misgivings about that. Some of it is, ‘Oh, our Bibles are printed in Communist China.’ Others are concerned about the economic situation, about what conditions these Bibles were produced under.”

The Chinese government’s restriction of Bible distribution is also troubling, said ChinaAid’s Bob Fu. “When brothers and sisters are being persecuted and arrested for their beliefs based on the same Bible, what does it mean to purchase an exported copy that says Made in China?”

China’s only legal printer of Bibles, Amity Printing Company, published its first Bible in cooperation with the United Bible Societies in 1987. Since then, more than half of the 100 million Bibles printed every year have been printed in China (50 million in 2019), making China the world’s biggest Bible publisher.

Printing Bibles is more difficult than printing other types of books, and requires a certain amount of expertise. That’s because of the specialized printing requirements for a complex book such as the Bible. Bibles require thin paper that cannot be fed into standard printing equipment, leather covers, stitched binding, color pages and special inserts such as maps. Most printers outside China do not have the range of facilities to manufacture the same Bibles.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Maybe Westerners seeing “Made in China” on their Bibles, can be a reminder to pray for those who made these Bibles. 2) God can use any instrument he chooses to spread his Word, even unbelieving, communist China (Isa. 55:11).

Kevin Ford, a dedicated Burger King cook and cashier, received a small goody bag from management as recognition for never taking a sick day during his 20-year tenure at the restaurant.

While Ford appreciated the gesture, social media users were outraged on his behalf, believing he deserved more than a bag of treats for his unwavering commitment to work. This prompted his daughter to start a GoFundMe campaign with a modest goal of $200 to help her father visit his grandchildren in Texas.

The campaign unexpectedly gained massive support, amassing over $400,000 in donations. People resonated with Ford's story, relating it to their own family members or friends who had made sacrifices for their jobs. He said, “I think they just wanted to show my employer and other CEOs that people deserve to be congratulated, rewarded, even just acknowledged for their hard work and dedication.”

Ford, a single father with four daughters, rarely took sick days because he couldn't afford to do so, as his job didn't offer paid sick leave. Even when facing health issues, he used his vacation days to avoid missing work. While his attendance record was uncommon, Ford has much in common with workers across the restaurant and accommodation sector, who often have to choose between unpaid time off and working while sick. He said, “I'd be lying down in front of the fryers because I was in so much pain and people would tell me to go home, but I was thinking about the power bill or the water bill.”

Despite the overwhelming support, Ford advises against following his example, emphasizing that his health and family suffered due to his extreme dedication to work. With the funds raised, however, Ford now has a second chance to enjoy retirement, contribute to his grandchildren's college education, and spend quality time with his children.

That said, he plans to continue working at Burger King in his immediate future. He said, “That's also my family there. We're fun and funny. When it's not like that, then I guess I'll retire."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even when employers don't recognize the value of your service, God always rewards those who diligently serve in his name and with his principles.

Iconic quiz show Jeopardy! faces an uncertain future due to ongoing labor strikes by two labor unions, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writers Guild of America (WGA). Sony Pictures Television, the show's producer, is exploring solutions like reusing questions to maintain broadcast continuity during the labor disputes. However, the imminent start of Season 40's production adds urgency to resolving the impasse.

Contestants set to compete in the upcoming Tournament of Champions have expressed solidarity with striking workers. Toronto's Ray Lalonde, a 13-time winner last season, declared his support on the Jeopardy! Reddit forum, vowing not to cross picket lines. More holdouts could cause a postponement to winter or spring.

Moreover, the status of hosts raises another concern—Mayim Bialik has already halted her duties until the resolution of the labor issues, while Ken Jennings faces increasing pressure to follow suit.

As Season 40's premiere approaches, the show's future hinges on negotiations between the two unions and Sony Pictures Television. Those negotiations are said to be imminent and/or ongoing. With a rich legacy and loyal fan base, the fate of Jeopardy! rests on key leaders in both camps being able to find middle ground in this dispute. And fortunately, the answer to this problem need not be stated in the form of a question.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Scripture has much to say about the rich and powerful withholding wages from the hardworking laborer. Regardless of how this particular strike is settled, there is a day coming in God’s timetable for all accounts to be settled in God’s courtroom (Jam. 5:1-6).

Freelance writer Jason Heller describes how he and his wife made a pact a few years ago:

Every Sunday, we swore to each other, we will abstain from work. We start our morning and end our day by bingeing TV in bed. The door of our apartment is opened only for pizza to be slid inside. Chores go undone. Fitness is spurned. Job-related emails and texts are not read.

Lazy Sunday, as we like to call it, is hardly a revolutionary idea. A weekly time of rest is an ancient staple of several religions. And the five-day workweek has been the standard in the U.S., (but) spillover into non-workdays is common. A 2015 Rand survey found that about half of American employees do work in their free time in order to meet job demands. For many who started working from home during the pandemic, the boundary between labor and leisure has dissolved even further.

We shouldn’t need to actively protect our one day off—but sadly, we do. Rest time can feel indulgent or unnatural. ... The instinct to hustle—whether for success or just survival—is hard to shake. Still, we do need respite—not only from our jobs but from all of the many obligations that crop up in adult life.

Pre-pact, Angie and I often used Sundays to prep for the coming workweek. We thought we were buying time that we could spend later. The problem is that work is a bottomless pit—there’s always more to do. Sometimes, the people we’ve been close to for decades are the very people we tend to take for granted. Taking a break gives Angie and me the opportunity to really see each other again.

That might be the most important reason to pause work: not just to fuel up in preparation for more work later on, but for the sake of the pause itself. Although Angie and I aren’t religious, we really do think of our secular day of rest as sacred; that’s why we take pains to protect it. When you take away all the tasks you might feel pressed to do on a Sunday, what you’re left with isn’t an absence. It’s an opening.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Sabbath; Sunday; Rest - Although this article was admittedly written from a secular point of view, and includes excessive time with the TV, the central idea agrees wholeheartedly with Scripture (Exod. 20:8-11; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2). Obviously, for the believer, Sunday rest would include gathering with the Lord’s people for worship (Heb. 10:24-25), but also taking the rest of the day for rest and recovery from the week. 2) Labor Day – This holiday is a good reminder to return to God’s guidance of taking one day a week off to rest, not just once a year.

It was a typical Monday morning at a cloud services company in Denver, except for a weeping 29-year-old project manager crouched in the emergency stairwell. Kieran Tie felt like “absolute trash” that day. He could no longer bring himself to sit through pointless management meetings and pretend to (care) about on-demand enterprise data storage.

In the preceding months, he’d found it increasingly difficult to complete the simplest of tasks. Plagued with insomnia and regularly forgetting meals, he’d developed a remarkably short temper. He had stormed out of meetings when he disagreed with higher-ups, something he’d never done before in a professional setting.

Tie said, “I felt like a failure because I didn’t know what to do.” The predicament confounded him because he had a great job at a growing company with talented colleagues. The hours, like the compensation (low six-figures, plus bonus) were “very fair,” and he could ride his bike to the office, 10 minutes from his house. And yet, as he rocked weeping in the fetal position in a stairwell underneath a fire extinguisher for the better part of an hour, it was clear something needed to change.

Across the country, more and more people are succumbing to emotional collapse at work. The World Health Organization included the colloquial term “burnout” in the International Classification of Diseases, listed as an “occupational phenomenon” with three symptoms:

1. Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion

2. Increased mental distance from one’s job or feeling negative toward one’s career

3. Reduced professional productivity

Not surprisingly, 94 percent of American workers say they’re stressed at work, 75 percent of Millennials believe they’re more stressed than their parents. and 80 percent say they’re in the midst of a quarter-life crisis. So, in the next five to ten years, we will see burnout increase and a lot more mental health problems begin to emerge as a consequence.

In May, 1853, Phoebe and her husband Holden Judson joined a covered wagon train near Kansas City hoping to reach Washington Territory by mid-October. This was a distance of more than 2,000 miles over the rough Oregon Trail. Like all wagon trains, they elected a captain. His word was the law. Well, they chose Rev. Gustavus Hines, only to be surprised one Saturday night when he announced the train would never travel on Sundays.

Phoebe was shocked. They had half a continent to cross, at oxen pace (15-20 miles per day on a good trail), with mountain passes and innumerable river crossings ahead of them. She sat in her wagon and just fumed. One family deserted the train and joined another.

On their first Sunday, while they stood still, one train after another passed them by. They started out again on Monday, only to reach their first river cross on Tuesday evening. A long line of wagons stretched out ahead of them, waiting for the single ferry to carry them across. They waited three days. On Saturday they resumed the journey, only to be told they would still rest the whole next day. Phoebe was livid. This made absolutely no sense to her.

Then, a few weeks later she began to see scores of dead oxen, mules, and horses along the trail. They had been driven so relentlessly, they had collapsed and died. She grudgingly admitted that perhaps the animals needed a day of rest.

A few weeks later, she ruefully admitted that maybe the men needed it too, since they walked most of the time. Then she slowly began to notice that as they worshipped, ate, rested, and even played together on Sundays, it had a remarkably beneficial effect upon people’s spirits. There was less grumbling, more cooperation. She even noticed that they seemed to make better time the other six days.

Finally, what totally sold her on the value of the Sabbath happened one Sunday evening. The family that had deserted them came limping into their campsite, humbly asking to rejoin them. She had assumed they were at least a week ahead; in fact, they had fallen behind. Their own wagon train had broken down! Of course, they welcomed them back. And so it happened that they reached their destination in plenty of time, as friends, and out of the 50 head of cattle with which they began, only two were lost.

Ten years ago, Nathaniel Miller was at a vocational fork in the road. He had spent years praying and dreaming about pastoring a church, but Miller was short on cash. A pastor at his church suggested he connect with one of the congregants who owned a plumbing company. A decade later, he’s still plumbing.

In an article in Christianity Today, Miller writes:

It turns out that work, manual labor in particular, had been sitting right under my nose as perhaps the most direct route to learning the skills needed by those who desire to lead the church. I suspect I’m not alone. Any of us can become better at following Jesus by focusing on the demands and spiritual realities of our work. Rightly understood, work is the training ground where good Christians are made.

When I’m installing a water heater … every facet of my being is involved in the execution and completion of the work …. Over the past decade as a blue-collar worker, I have accidentally found a way of life that, far from keeping prayer at bay and hindering me from being with God because of my duties, has put me in the middle of a centuries-long, devout experiment. It teaches me at least these two things: In Christ, I am praying precisely because I am working, and I am becoming better at being a pray-er because I am a worker.

My hands participate in the work of bringing order to the world around me, and they thumb through theological works; they bring peace between homeowners and their homes, and they build the kingdom; they’ve learned to turn wrenches, and they’re learning to pray without ceasing.

I’ve discovered that practicing being in God’s presence and growing in the Christian life is something any of us can do in virtually any line of work, not just as pastors or church leaders. My plumbing vocation certainly isn’t the life I expected, but it’s turning out to be the life for which I prayed.

After high school, Brandon Yates became an electrician. Finally, when he became a master electrician Yates founded KC One, an electrical contracting services company based in Kansas City, Missouri.

Yates said, “Craftsman is a lost word in our day.” He aims to change that by recruiting hardworking high-school graduates with an aptitude for making things. KC One’s apprenticeship program provides on-the-job training and certifications for one or two young electricians each year. “Society teaches these kids that they’ll become losers if they become electricians. My job is to unteach them.”

The perception that the trades offer less status and money, and demand less intelligence, is one likely reason young people have turned away from careers in the trades for several generations. In Yates’s school district, officials recently shuttered the entire shop class program. Scholar Mike Rose says, “In our culture, the craftsman is a muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no thought bright behind the eye.” Thinking, it’s assumed, is for the office, not the shop.

However, Scripture identifies Jesus himself as a tekton (Mark 6:3, literally “craftsman” or “one who works with his hands”). So, we think it’s high time to challenge the tradesman stereotype, and to rethink the modern divide between white collar and blue collar, office and shop, in light of the Divine Craftsman who will one day make all things new.

Most college graduates have had little, if any, training in repairing a leaky toilet or hardwiring a smoke detector. For an awful lot of college graduates, without help, their pipes would be forever clogged. Without reintegrating the trades back into the liberal arts, we will perpetuate the falsehood that plumbers, electricians, and other skilled laborers are somehow less intelligent.

Possible Preaching Angle:

If there is a renaissance in craftsmanship, it should be welcomed by Christians. After all, we look to a day when we will inhabit a house Jesus has built—a richly prepared mansion that owes its beauty to a single designer and laborer (John 14:2). God is Maker, Creator of the heavens and the earth; and God is Fixer, Redeemer and Restorer of a broken world. As we look forward to the heavenly city, whose Architect and Builder is God (Heb. 11:10), perhaps we owe it to our children and grandchildren to encourage more of them to be makers and fixers, too.

Author Kate Bowler, associate professor at Duke Divinity School, has fresh insights on the “Gospel of Hustle” that has pervaded American culture for decades. She laments popular, accepted axioms like “everything is possible if you will only believe” and "everything you need is already inside of you”.

She says, “American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life. You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits. There is infinity lurking somewhere at the bottom of your inbox or in the stack of self-help books on the bedside table.”

At age 35, Bowler was diagnosed with incurable stage IV colon cancer, which caused her to rethink ideas about hustle culture--doing more, pushing more to achieve success. She wonders what “enoughness” feels like. She has been able to manage her cancer with immunotherapy and has a new perspective:

We are believers in the gospel of hustle, the gospel of efficiency and the gospel of time management. We are convinced that we need to just discipline ourselves into better routines. But the whole idea of a formula breaks down when it can't solve the problem of being a person. It doesn't solve the problem of pain. For example, the gospel of hustle, the more I worked, the more work I got. Even success looks like failure, and I was just trying to get to the end of the mythical workday.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is exactly why Solomon mourned the futility of life in Ecclesiastes. The ultimate answer to life is not found in working harder, but in what Jesus said, “Come unto me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

In late September, Mike Warner, a photojournalist for Portland’s KATU News, tweeted an announcement: “NO NEWS MONDAY … just a heads up, the @KATUNews morning and afternoon shows have been preempted and will NOT air on Monday, Sep. 27th. The entire news team is attending a seminar to help deal with on-the-job stress and trauma.”

In his explanation, Warner explained that the staff would be watching a presentation from The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism research organization specializing in ethics and leadership. During the Monday timeslots normally dedicated to the day’s news, viewers were given an explanation by KATU staff, who explained, “We’ve taken our employees out of the mix today, to do some training, and to support them while working in this challenging time.”

To underscore how unprecedented a move this was, Warner tweeted an explanation:

In almost 25 years as a photojournalist, I’ve never seen a newsroom do this. But it’s been a crazy time filled with a raging pandemic, out of control violence, political unrest, riots, and ongoing death & destruction. Personally speaking, seeing bodies daily gets to you. #stress

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even professionals at processing and delivering bad news are still human. Even Jesus took time to get away even when there was more work to do. Being a Christian requires that we respect our physical and emotional limits.

Author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the migration of more than six million black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life from 1915-1970. Among them was Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

Pershing attempted to find employment the summer after his freshman year at Leland College. In the late 1930's, jobs were hard to come by, especially for an African American living in the Jim Crow south. To make matters worse, job preference was regularly given to young Black men who were not seeking a college education.

One summer, he went looking for work at the sawmill. He saw a classmate there from high school and was told the work wasn’t too hard. It was stacking wood staves to make barrels. Pershing asked the foreman for a job, but he was told that there was nothing available.

He was getting desperate. He spotted his friend stacking staves. “Show me how to do this.” The friend showed him what to do, and Pershing worked beside him. He looked up and saw the foreman watching him. Pershing pretended not to see him, worked even harder. The foreman left, and, when he came back, Pershing was still at work. At the end of the day, the foreman hired him.

Pershing finished out the summer stacking staves, not minding the hard work and not finding it demeaning. He said, “Sometimes, you have to stoop to conquer.”

A bus driver became greatly irritated whenever he parked his bus at the parking spot at the midpoint of his route. The reason for this was the open field which was being turned into an unofficial litter dump. Since he had a seven-minute break between his trips, he decided to do something about the situation.

Taking advantage of his breaks through the day, the driver used the time to clear up the litter stage by stage into garbage bags. After some time, all the litter had been successfully cleared. Not stopping at that, he began to plant flower seeds on the land and soon turned it into a picturesque meadow. Learning of his creative efforts, many passengers would thereafter ride the extra distance with him to the parking lot, just to see the beautiful work he had done.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Would you be willing to do something beautiful today to make the world a better place to live in? An unknown author said, “Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.” The Bible further says, “For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10).