Sacred and Profane

One of my hobby horses is the otherness of God and how important I believe it is to 'bump' into Him sometimes. Because I work in such a meaningless job, where the only reward is money and I consequently get to eat, I have always mentally kept the rest of my life quite separately compartmentalised in my mind from it. I realise that this is of course, not the way it is supposed to be.

Yesterday, I was at a client and as I was ratcheting the straps to secure a machine to the trailer in the deserted loading area with all the industrial plant equipment around me, I glanced across into the big warehouse a little distance away from me with its large roller doors. I could see the inside of the roof, and it was one of those industrial corrugated steel roofs that is interspersed with clear polycarbonate strips like skylights to let in natural light. I then raised my gaze and right above the roof was the clear, blue, wide open morning sky. What a contrast! The warehouse was not badly lit, but looked positively dingy compared to the sky above. For the first time in my life, I really felt that there may be some sort of connection between my normal drudgery and the happiness and peace I feel when I am away from work and contemplating God. This is an obvious and most basic Christian principle - that we are not supposed to live dualistic lives, but for so long, I really have known no other way. I have always rationalised that it was the only way I could cope with the meaningless futility of my daily work without going insane.

I believe that this simple experience was a nudge from God for me to open the skylights of my life - or rip the roof off and let God's grace not only help me to cope, but transform my work, or my understanding of it, as a way to serve Him. I realised in retrospect, that He prepared me for this moment a few weeks ago, when I came across some statistics, where I discovered that the second highest cause of accidental death after motor vehicle accidents was from slip and fall accidents -a problem which our machinery directly addresses. I suppose if nothing else, perhaps if a father gets to return safely home to his family or a young single mother working in a factory returns safely to her waiting baby and isn't paralysed from an accident because of my job, it has, if not given me a sense of meaning, at least helped someone. As the Caterpillar equipment slogan goes: Safely home. Every one. Every day.

It is as if God needs me to learn this lesson and He was determined that I learn it, because if I ever end up in some sort of full time ministry one day, it is something I will need to know, so that my spirituality is centred on and rooted in God, but grounded in reality and not a separate attachment or escape. It is not only beneficial and even imperative that in the 'ugliest' or most tedious parts of my life as well as the happiest and most joyful are integrated into my spirituality so that in Him I can truly 'live and move and have my being' (Acts 17:28), but nothing less than a call to authentic holiness.

I know this is no new great profound idea here - just me finally hearing what I should have a long time ago.