There are two sentences that a great many people say about themselves, and almost nobody has ever put them next to each other.
The first is: it is just a job.
The second is a list of everything they love. The house with the garden. The daughter who is doing well at school. Sunday lunch with eleven people in it. The camping trip in August that everybody talks about all year.
Picture the woman who says both. She works in a call center. She has apologized for that job at every party she has been to in nine years.
And she has never once, in nine years, noticed that the call center pays for the camping trip.
That is the actual state of things and it is not a trick of perspective. The two things are connected by a direct and unbroken line. The wage from the job she is embarrassed by is the mechanism by which the life she is proud of exists.
She holds both facts. She simply keeps them in separate rooms, and has done for a decade.
And the reason is not stupidity. It is that she has been taught to evaluate a job by what it feels like from the inside, and never once by what it produces on the outside. Nobody at a party asks what your job pays for. They ask what you do and whether you enjoy it, which are the two questions that make an ordinary job sound like nothing.
The gift that has three things in it
There is a line in Ecclesiastes that puts three items in a single sentence, and the third one is the surprise.
And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 3:13, King James Version)
Eat, drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor.
Notice the third phrase. The good of all his labor. Not enjoy his labor. Enjoy the good of it, which is what the labor produces, which is the meal on the table and the roof over it.
And all three of those together are called one gift.
You have been handed a gift with three parts in one sentence, and Ecclesiastes 3 puts eating and drinking and the good of the work together and calls it the gift of God (Ecclesiastes 3:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who joins two things a person has kept in separate rooms for a decade.
And it says it again a couple of chapters later, more directly.
Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 5:19)
Power to eat thereof. That is a strange phrase and it is doing real work. Having the thing and being able to enjoy the thing are described as two separate gifts, and the second one does not come automatically with the first.
Which describes her exactly. She has the life. She has not been able to enjoy it as something her work produced, because she has never connected them.
You have a life you have not been able to enjoy as the fruit of anything, and Ecclesiastes 5 names the power to eat as a separate gift from the having (Ecclesiastes 5:19), and the Spirit of God is the one who gives the second gift as well as the first.
Given us richly all things to enjoy
There is a sentence in First Timothy that is usually quoted for its warning and has a clause at the end that people skip.
Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. (1 Timothy 6:17)
Who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.
That is at the end of a warning, which is the interesting part. Paul has just told people not to trust in what they have, and then he immediately guards against the opposite error, which is treating enjoyment itself as suspect.
You are permitted to enjoy what your work has bought, and 1 Timothy 6 says He giveth us richly all things to enjoy in the same breath as a warning (1 Timothy 6:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes gladness about a camping trip into something with weight rather than something trivial.
You have not been given things on condition that you feel guilty about them, and 1 Timothy 6:17 puts richly and enjoy in the same clause (1 Timothy 6:17), and the Spirit of God is the one who removes an apology that was never required.
What this is not
Let me be plain, because this could turn into something hollow.
This is not saying that everybody who dislikes their job should cheer up because they have a garden. Some jobs are genuinely damaging and no amount of gratitude arithmetic fixes that.
It is also not saying she should stop wanting different work. She might change jobs and it might be right.
And it is not saying money is the point. The point is not the wage. The point is that a wage is a mechanism, and she has been evaluating the mechanism without ever looking at what it produces.
And plainly: if the job has become the kind that damages a person, or if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is bigger than a perspective problem. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Getting help is not ingratitude.
You are not being told to be grateful instead of honest, and Ecclesiastes 5 treats the enjoying as a gift rather than as a duty (Ecclesiastes 5:19), and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives it rather than demanding it.
So here is the turn, and it happens on a piece of paper.
You are enjoying the good of your own labor, and Ecclesiastes 3:13 calls eating and drinking and the good of the work one single gift of God (Ecclesiastes 3:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence written by a man examining everything under the sun and lays it over a call center wage and a camping trip.
Now the counterfeit, and it does not sound like shame, it sounds like modesty. It says: it is only a job, and there is nothing to say about it. Look at the shape of that. It names the person rather than a thing, it opens no door, and its only instruction is to keep two true sentences apart so that neither of them can strengthen the other. Conviction from the Holy Spirit names one specific thing and always opens a door in the same breath.
You have not been living a small life funded by an embarrassment, and 1 Timothy 6:17 says God giveth us richly all things to enjoy (1 Timothy 6:17), and that work belongs to the Spirit of God, who has been in the call center and in the garden on Saturday morning.
Nothing here promises the calls get better. They do not. What is settled is that the good of the work is named as the gift rather than the work itself, that the power to enjoy is a separate gift from the having, and that a wage is a mechanism connected by an unbroken line to a life somebody loves.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, with the list in your hand. You are in Christ, and that is what makes the authority to speak over your own life delegated rather than invented. God calls the good of a person's labor a gift, so speak to the shame about the job that pays for everything you love, and then leave the outcome to Him.
- Shame about the job that pays for it all, you are not clear sight and you have kept two true things apart. The Word of God says every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his work, and calls that the gift of God.
- Habit of apologizing for what I do, you are put out in the name of Jesus. Ecclesiastes 5 calls the power to eat thereof a separate gift, and I am taking that one as well as the first.
- Father, First Timothy 6 says You give us richly all things to enjoy. I read out loud what this wage actually buys and I stop being ashamed of the job that pays for the life I am proud of, and I thank You that Your Spirit is in the call center and in the garden on Saturday morning.
Ecclesiastes 3:13
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