Imagining Healthy Work

These excerpts from Jeffery Bilbo’s lecture at Spring Arbor University’s annual Focus series gets to the heart of why “good work often seems impossible…”

I’ll begin with a rough definition of good work, one we can refine as we proceed. Good human work participates in God’s redemptive work; thus it is our loving, healing, and humane acting out the image of God that we bear, the image that obliges us to be God’s representatives to his creation.  Thus, as Wendell Berry argues, bad work is actually blasphemous: “To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God” (“Christianity and the Survival of Creation” 104). This may seem like an extremely high view of work, and that’s because it is.