Surprise! It's "work!" (rah)
Christians recognize that the mandate to work, to cultivate and care for the earth, comes before the fall into sin, and thus that work and toil are not simply identical, and that the grinding and depressing aspects of much of our work today are deformations and defects that point to, albeit often indirectly and haltingly, the divinely created order of work as good. The identification of work from a Christian perspective as other-directed, defined as service of others, provides a needed corrective to the errors of viewing work either simply “as a curse or an obligation for which we received payment,” as Critchley and Webster put it, or as the pinnacle of human self-expression.
A guy who used to work at 2850, Lester DeKoster, said work was “the meaning” of the Christian life, but only after work has been properly defined and contextualized as “the form in which we make ourselves useful to man and thus to God.” God has ordained our work as the primary means by which we address the material needs of ourselves and others, and by which we acts as stewards in God’s creation, simultaneously forming our character and our civilization. This perspective, which includes the fallen aspects of human work without reducing it to such defects, is an authentically Christian view of work, rooting our subjective experiences of work within God’s objective and transcendent providence.
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