Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

We need to remember that work — all by itself, for its own sake is good. So if you’re the IT specialist at a cell-phone company and you can repurpose your skill set to fight injustice or end world hunger or make the name of Jesus famous — fantastic. Go do it. As long as you know that just being an IT specialist is enough. What you’re doing matters. You make it possible — along with the tens of thousands of other people who work for your company — for people to pick up a phone and call the people they love, anywhere in the world, anytime of day. That, my friend, is Garden work. What you do is a gift to the rest of us. Thank you for serving.

They argue Jesus is rephrasing the cultural mandate in light of human sin in exile from Eden, and in light of his in-breaking kingdom.

And a new calling — to make disciples. To help people come back into relationship with the Creator, so that they can rule over the creation. Not just so they can get forgiveness and go to heaven when they die. But so that they can come back from heaven and rule over the earth as they were always supposed to (more on that toward the end of the book).

But you’re also called to make disciples. To tell people about your Rabbi Jesus. And to live in such a way that people ask questions, not just about IT, but about life, meaning, purpose, joy, peace, community, hope, why you’re a little bit different. And through that, hopefully you get to invite people to become disciples of Jesus, and follow him into his work of culture making.

The odds are he was closer to what we call a construction worker. Strong, burly, tough, hard-working. Either way, he was a tekton for decades. And if working an ordinary, nonglamorous “secular” job wasn’t beneath the embodiment of the Creator himself, why would it be below us?

Paul didn’t see his job as a distraction from his calling to the kingdom, but as a vital part of it.

If tent making wasn’t beneath the most prolific author in the New Testament, why wouldn’t it be good enough for us?

In Hebrew the word for “glory” is kavod. Literally it means “weighty” or “heavy.” So God’s glory is his weight? His heaviness? The idea behind kavod is God’s significance. He’s weighty, as in important. There’s something about this God that we need to stand in awe of. And all through the Scriptures, God’s glory is about two things: Presence and beauty.

It was the prophet Habakkuk who said that we’re heading toward a world where “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”4 So right now, not everybody knows about God’s kavod; some people are blind and oblivious, but in the near future, everybody will know about it. Because the awareness of God’s kavod will fill the earth like the waters cover the sea.

The question that Steve has to wrestle with — that we all have to wrestle with in our own way — is, how does he glorify God with bags? Does he burn the name Jesus into the leather? Or shape the strap like a cross? Or sew John 3v16 into the lining? Or stuff a paperback version of the gospel of Mark in the pocket? Or . . . does he just make a really, really nice bag? How do any of us glorify God with our work if it’s not overtly Christian?

The Anglican writer John Stott said the kind of work we’re called to is, “The expenditure of energy (manual or mental or both) in the service of others, which brings fulfillment to the worker, benefit to the community, and glory to God.”9

Well, if God’s glory is his presence and beauty, then, as I see it, we glorify God by reshaping the raw materials of the world in such a way that, for those with eyes to see, God’s presence and beauty are made visible.

In the same way, when we see creation, we see behind the creation and get a picture of what the Creator is like. In Romans we read, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

When we see the world in the shape that God intended, the way it’s supposed to be, God gets glory, without a word.

Remember that phrase from Genesis? “It was very good,” that word “good” has to do with aesthetic good. It can be translated “lovely” or “beautiful.” A tree can’t be good or evil; it can only be beautiful or ugly. And God made it beautiful. Nothing about creation says that God is a tightfisted, utilitarian, bean-counting pragmatist; God is a lavish, opulent, extravagant artist, and creation is his beauty on display.

Theologian Ben Witherington III (how cool would that be, to have III at the end of your name?) puts it this way: “Sometimes Christians, especially frugal ones, think that the creating of elaborate, beautiful works of art, worth lots of money, is itself either a waste of money or at least not good stewardship, if it is not simply sinful altogether. What this story suggests is just the opposite.”14 Sometimes in our quest against injustice and greed and waste and in our passion to steward the wealth of the West in a kingdom-of-God-like way, it’s easy to overreact and devalue the things that God himself values, like art or beauty. But that’s a problem, because we worship an artist God.

My point here isn’t to “tone down all the Jesus talk” — no, Jesus should always be on the tip of our tongue. And glorifying God isn’t the same thing as making disciples. Remember, we’re called to do both. My point is that what you do can be done for God’s kavod. But it’s not just what you do. It’s also how you do it.

The early church father Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”17

In the same way that a tree glorifies God just by being a tree, we can glorify God just by being a really good human being.

Now, I’m well aware that most of us aren’t Bach. Most of us aren’t going to write a concerto or have our name on Wikipedia. But we all image God in our own small way. What if our lives, every aspect of them — from what we do for work and rest to how we do it — were soli Deo gloria? That would really be something.

Benjamin Franklin.1 What he actually said was that every person should be a “Jack of all trades, master of one.” He was making the exact opposite point. He was saying that every one of us should get incredibly good at one thing. Sure, be well-rounded, know a little about everything, dabble if you want, fine. As long as you’re a master/craftsman/specialist/expert/scholar/authority/black belt/maestro of one.

In fact, discipleship to Jesus is about one simple question: if Jesus were me, if he lived in my city, had my job, my education, made my salary, had my family, how would he live? That is the question.

Do you see your work as an essential part of your discipleship to Jesus and as the primary way that you join him in his work of renewal?

But in the Hebrew Scriptures, “son of God” was a name for Israel, and then later for the Messiah, Israel’s representative, a kinglike figure on the horizon who would draw Israel’s story to its climax and usher in the kingdom of God.

And as he goes all over the north of Israel, doing his thing, the writer Mark has this word he uses over and over for people’s response to Jesus’ work — ekplesso. It’s translated “amazed” or “marveled” or “overwhelmed.”9 People are blown away by Jesus’ skill. As one observer put it, “He has done everything well.”

We’re trying to do too much. To focus, we need to know what we’re called by God to do, and what we’re not called to do. Who we are, and who we aren’t.

Or it’s pushed off to the side by our jealousy, wishing we were somebody else.

There’s an ancient rabbinic saying that’s worth quoting here. The legendary Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said this: “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’

“I would love to, but I’m called to father my three kids, and tonight we’re building a fort in the living room.”

Some of us end up doing a lot of good things, but we never get around to doing the best thing.

So, that’s the first takeaway for me from Jesus’ life. An unnerving level of focus. The other observation I see is the high quality of Jesus’ work. It wasn’t haphazard or sloppy. It was really well-done.

A genuine, authentic love of excellence isn’t rooted in greed or narcissism or materialism — that’s dualism talking. It’s rooted in love, for God and others. A desire to serve God and his world well.

What she meant was that the best way to love and serve others with our job was just to be really good at our jobs. If you’re a pilot, the best way to serve your passengers is to be a really good pilot. If you’re a chef, the best way to serve your customers is to make really good food. If you’re a neurosurgeon, the best way to serve your patients is to be a really good doctor.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to be the best.

Your job isn’t to be the best in your field, just the best version of yourself.

But that said, if we’re going to get really good at something, it’s going to take time. And effort. And energy. Lots of it.

So, after all that, here’s what I’m saying: Do one thing. And do one thing well. And do that one thing well as an act of service and love for the world and to the glory of God.

If you’re really good at whatever it is you do, you don’t need to tell the rest of us. We’ll know. Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.

What if God’s people were known as the best carpenters and the best CEOs and the most educated teachers and the most creative artists and the most ingenious writers and as the most humble, self-effacing, down-to-earth, servant-hearted, loving people around? I think that would make God very happy.

I’m humbled after I complete every new project, and as I stand there with a big silly grin on my face, I feel his presence and approval.”

You might not be able to generate an income from what you love to do, or maybe even from what you’re called to do, and so you’ll have to either give it up or get a “day job” and do it in your free time.

But my generation left the atmosphere. We aren’t happy with just a high-paying job, a nice car, and the occasional expensive vacation. We want our dreams to come true. We want fulfillment from our work.

One of my friend’s last name is Buckstaber. It’s German for “bookmaker.” His great-great-great grandfather was a bookmaker. And his father before him. And his father before him.

If your last name is Smith, the odds are your great-great-great grandfather was a blacksmith.

But the array of choices can be paralyzing.

And once we finally settle on a career, our expectations are so, so high. Food on the table might have been enough for grandma, or a nice TV to watch the game for dad, but not for us. We want to do something we love.

First, our dreams will probably take way longer than we’re expecting. Years, if not decades of straight-up hard work. Remember that ten-thousand-hours thing? There will be days, even months, where you roll over in the morning and think, Another day . . . There’s a reason patience is fast becoming a thing of the past. It’s brutally hard. Second, other people will do a lot better than us. No matter how smart or hard working or gifted or charismatic we are, there will always be somebody better than us.

Third — and stay with me, the depressing part is almost over, I promise — if and when we finally “make it” and are successful, it’s never quite as great as we hoped. Or if it is, then the euphoric feeling of a dream come true is ephemeral. It doesn’t last very long.

That’s a scientific way of saying that we all have expectations. If you do better than your expectations, then the odds are you will be happy. But if your life doesn’t measure up to what you were hoping for, then the odds are, no matter how successful you are, you will be unhappy.

My point — and thank you for not giving up a few paragraphs ago — is that we should expect our work to be a mixed bag — good and bad. We should expect some of our dreams to come true and to feel a bit of letdown. We should expect work to give us a sense of meaning and purpose and to be regularly frustrated by whatever it is we do.