Working without wilting

Starting Well To Finish Strong

Jago Wynne

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844743728
• eBook ISBN: 9781844748624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Day one in the new job. You're keen, you're nervous and your new shoes are pinching. Will you get there on time? Will you fit in? And will you be competent - or clueless?




Many start their first job with three great hopes: a brand new status, a salary and loads of job satisfaction. Some even plan to shine for Jesus in their workplace.




But all too often the pressures of work life cause even the keenest Christians to wilt.




Jago Wynne believes with a passion that people can flourish in their work and keep their faith intact, if properly prepared. With humour, insight and real-life stories he equips readers both to negotiate the first few months and to continue wholeheartedly with Jesus at work - for an entire working life.

Part 1
Work is a treadmill

The life cycle of work

It’s not just flowers that wilt.

It had all been going so well. I had finally joined the gym. I had been inducted in how to use all the equipment by the woman who looked like an SAS commando. She had given me the exercise regime to which I had to commit. There I stood among the weights and machines, with old football socks, shorts, a baggy white T-shirt with a picture of a large-nosed monkey on it, weedy white legs, even weedier white arms – a picture of gym virginity. It was my first session in this year’s plan to get fit. All plans in the millennium had failed so far. But this one, I assured myself, was going to be different.

First stop was a gentle warm-up on the bicycle, followed by a few stretches which I personally felt were superfluous to requirements. But then came the first real test – the rowing machine. How fast could I row 1,000 metres? Off I went like Steve Redgrave on Red Bull, and I completed the task – even if the Steve Redgrave surge did disappear for the last 900 metres. It nearly killed me, but I was dedicated to the cause.

My exercise regime told me that next up was the running machine, and so I clambered onto the treadmill, spent a while pressing buttons to try to get the machine to actually move, and eventually got going with my ten-minute run.

It only lasted three minutes.

There’s no easy way to explain this. I wilted. In fact, it was a rather spectacular wilt. I fell off the treadmill. I didn’t mean to get cramp in my right calf, nor to forget to hit the red emergency stop button. And so after three minutes of running, I found myself in a heap of agony on the floor. It felt as if I was having a heart attack. I certainly looked as if I was having a heart attack. Yet all the muscle-rippling men and Lycra-clad ladies around me continued in harmony with their machines as if nothing had happened and this sprawled mess on the floor just didn’t exist. So much for love thy treadmill neighbour.

There are many Christians who enter the world of work only to find that, over time, their faith wilts due to all the challenges that the workplace brings. For some, their wilting faith is as spectacular and sudden as my wilting on the treadmill. It breaks our Father’s heart.

It may seem ages away, but when you retire, whether that is in forty-five years or forty-five days, I long that you will be more intimate with Jesus than you are now, more obedient in pleasing him and more passionate for his name to be honoured. I hope that when retirement comes, you will not have wilted in your faith, but rather will have matured and flourished and been fruitful in your walk with the Lord – at work, as well as outside it. I long that the Holy Spirit would take this book and that he would use it as part of his means of working in your life. I pray that, unlike me on the treadmill, you would start well and finish strong.

That’s why Part 1 is picturing work as a treadmill. Not because we are like hamsters, bored out of our brains, spinning on our treadmill (some find work to be permanently mono­tonous and dull, but it’s not intended to be), but because the life cycle of work resembles a treadmill. After all, each of us steps onto the treadmill of work, keeps going on it, and then at some point we step off. But the million-dollar question is this: how do we do that without wilting in our faith?

1. Stepping onto the treadmill

Day One in the job is scary whoever you are. Extrovert or introvert. Christian or atheist. Brain or brawn. It doesn’t matter. As you are about to step onto the work treadmill, you’re a bag of nerves.

My first day in the office as a management consultant was in the middle of a sweltering August when people were in danger of passing out on the London Underground due to the heat – and the smell of stale body odour. This meant that by the time I had negotiated the delights of the Northern Line and come up for air, embarrassing sweat patches were beginning to appear on my now not-so-freshly-ironed shirt. Fortunately, I was at the office well before I needed to be, so I was able to make a sweaty beeline for the Gents in the main reception, and then spent about twenty minutes locked in a cubicle with my shirt off, towelling down the dripping sweat with loo paper, while shaking my shirt trying to get the damp patches to dis­appear. It was not the classiest start to my new job.

Being clueless

Now sweat patches might not be a problem for you, but there are some issues that are much more common concerns for people as Day One approaches. The number one issue that takes up people’s mind time as they start a new job is the fear of being clueless. We are petrified that we will be unable to perform as well as we are expected to. We think we won’t make the grade; we won’t understand all the jargon; everyone else will be far more competent and qualified than we are. We somehow forget that starting out in a job means that we are not actually expected to know every detail about everything. A friend who trained as an architect told me that his chief fear on starting his first job after qualifying was that he knew he ‘didn’t really have a clue how to do the job’. Yet in further discussion, he admitted that after a few weeks at work, to his surprise, he discovered that he was far better at his job than he thought.

Some jobs – like being an architect – require specific training to be able to get the role. But other jobs don’t. For example, if you’re going to be a civil servant, a telesales operator, a banker or an office administrator, you don’t require any particular training or qualification before starting the job. I didn’t require any specific qualification to be a management consultant. As a result, my employer expected me to have some level of incompetence and ignorance to begin with. In fact, in my initial training in the first few weeks, they even told me what to do in a situation where a client demanded to know whether I was up to the job they were paying me to do.

I needed that training. In the first few weeks at my first client – a large investment bank – I was collared by one of the senior bank managers when we were in the lift together, and he asked me straight out, ‘You look very young. What qualifies you to be doing this role, and for our bank to be paying huge amounts of money for your services?’

Those sweat marks started reappearing on my shirt very fast. With faltering voice, I replied with the pre-prepared answer I had been told to give. ‘I have gone through the rigorous and comprehensive graduate training programme and so am fully qualified for the role I have been asked to perform on this project.’ It didn’t sound very convincing. I’m not sure he was totally convinced. I certainly wouldn’t have been.

Being cold-shouldered

Up there with being clueless is the fear of being cold- shouldered and not fitting in. It’s only natural that we want to make a good impression. We all like to be liked. Sarah is a Christian who recently got a job as the receptionist at a financial PR company. In her words, the organization was very ‘old-school – lots of double-barrels and red braces’. She feared not fitting in with people of a very different background from her own, so she found herself speaking in a fake ‘posh voice’ at work in an effort to be accepted.

Changing our voice may be extreme, but we all fear being cold-shouldered in the environment where we are going to spend the majority of our waking hours. And it is because of this fear that we can find ourselves compromising our faith and not living in a way that would honour our Saviour. James started working as a sports agent recently and he told me how, from the very first week, he really struggled with telling the truth because the culture of his workplace is one where truth is malleable. As I look back to my first week as a consultant, I remember I didn’t get roaring drunk, but I know there were a couple of occasions when I had more alcohol than I should have done. Why did I do that? Because I didn’t want to be on the outside. I wanted to fit in.

Unlike the fear of being clueless, this fear of being cold-shouldered is a fear that is more marked for the Christian. Whether or not we are weird – and some Christians undoubtedly are – the very fact that we are Christians will make us different from the majority of our colleagues. We will seem weird, even if we are not. Our Christianity is naturally something that marks us out as different.

Being a chicken

We know that, whatever else we are doing as we enter our workplaces, we are going there as ambassadors for the Lord Jesus Christ. And because in all of us there is this desire to fit in and not be cold-shouldered, we fear that we will end up being a chicken when it comes to being open about our Christian faith. In most people, a very real battle wages as Day One approaches. On the one hand, there is the realization that there is no apparent need to ‘come out’ as Christians because we are still able to do our job perfectly well, even if people don’t know we are Christians. But on the other hand, there is an obvious real need to tell people we are Christians as an early part of our role as ambassadors for Christ.

My assessment from talking to many Christians in the workplace is that actually there are relatively few immediate negative responses from people when they discover someone to be a Christian. Negative reactions will often come over time for the Christian standing up for Christ at work, but in the pluralistic society we live in, people are generally not aggressively anti-Christian when they first hear of someone’s faith. Ian, who works in IT, told me, ‘People have a tendency to treat it as though you’ve told them you like fencing – nice for you, but who cares?’ That is frustrating in the long term as we seek to point people to Christ – but in the short term of the first few days at work, it’s worth remembering that when people discover you are a Christian, it is unlikely that they will walk away from you and never speak to you again. Unless they find fencing distasteful.

Things to remember

Being clueless. Being cold-shouldered. Being a chicken. These are not the only concerns for a Christian starting out on the work treadmill, but they do remind us that the workplace is a tough environment. For most people, it is far more challenging spiritually than the challenge of being a new student during freshers week.

So apart from wearing a shirt that hides our sweat, what do we need to remember as we step onto the work treadmill – whether that treadmill is our very first job or, as with my dad, a new job at the age of sixty-nine?

Prepare for the first week

There is no more critical a period than the first week in a job. Those early days set the course for the rest of our time in the company or organization. The way people view us, and the hours we work, are often largely determined in the first week. There are lots of challenges, but there are also lots of opportu­nities. People will ask questions about us far more readily at the start than once everything has settled down. So it is key to nail our colours to the mast early on concerning our faith in Jesus.

Mark recently changed jobs to work in a hedge fund and when he was being interviewed for the job he deliberately decided to state up front in the interview that he was a Christian and that he was not up for sailing close to the wind morally. He told them he was not worth employing if that was going to be part of the work.

I would suggest praying for an opportunity to let people know you are a Christian in the first week of a new job. Of course, be natural with people. Of course, don’t just crowbar the fact that you are a Christian into a discussion about sales strategy. Of course, don’t just ram the fact that you are a Christian down people’s throats within five minutes of meeting them. But the longer you leave it, the more difficult it is to tell someone you’re a Christian.

So get ready before you start the job. Think through how you might explain to someone that you are a Christian. If no-one knows you are a Christian by the end of the first week, there’s an easy solution. Week Two. Monday morning. Ask a colleague, ‘What did you get up to at the weekend?’ Your colleague will tell you their weekend exploits, and if they are polite they will then ask you about yours. And you can tell them what you did, including the fact that you went to church. If they are not polite and so don’t ask you, it’s still not a problem. You just say, ‘Sounds great. Mine was pretty hectic too. I watched the rugby, went to a mate’s party and then went to church on Sunday.’

And it’s out there – a minuscule squirt of fragrant perfume. It’s out there – someone at work knows that there is some connection between you and Jesus Christ. It’s out there – and only God knows what will happen next.

Pray for all areas of your life

When I was a management consultant I didn’t pray much about things connected to my job. This is the clearest indication to me now that I didn’t sufficiently value my work as a ministry in which I was serving God. I would pray for people I worked with and for my future career direction – and I’d encourage anyone else to do the same. But I very rarely prayed about the things I was involved in at work – the presentation, the meeting, the number-crunching in the Excel spreadsheet. My lack of prayer showed up my lack of theological understanding about my work. God was just as interested in the presentation I was preparing as a management consultant as he was in the Bible study I was preparing as a pastor. I may have believed that in the abstract, but functionally and practi­cally, my prayer life demonstrated a very different belief.

Part of my research for this book has meant asking loads of people what their top bit of advice was for Christians about to start their first job. By far and away the most frequent response was: ‘Pray.’ Dom is a barrister and he wrote this to me in an e-mail:

Pray about your work and your time there! Set aside time to pray in the morning and pray about what lies ahead at the office. Pray as you walk up the steps to work. Pray as you pick up the phone to answer a phone call. Pray before opening a document. And don’t just pray about the specifics of the work on your desk, but pray about your witness there too.

So pray about your work. But praise God for your work too. In your workplace, you will find that most people speak about how they are just dragging themselves through to the weekend. According to a recent Gallup poll, one in five workers is ‘actively disengaged’ from their job and a further three in five are described as ‘sleepwalking’ through their day.1 In that kind of culture, it is very difficult not to find ourselves having exactly the same mentality unless we are regularly giving thanks to God – for his gift of work itself, and for the wealth of incidental experience and relationships that come with it.

Pursue a Christian support network

If I was expecting prayer to be the most common response from people in terms of advice for the Christian starting out in work, I was not expecting the second most common response. Time and time again, I was told how it was critical to encourage people to link up with other Christians – and particularly in an environment where work is actively discussed.

One of the hardest things about moving from student life to working life is suddenly finding that it is more of a challenge to have Christian fellowship. Whether it has been the Student Christian Union or a church youth group, up until this point it is likely that you will have been part of a distinct church ministry for your age group. Suddenly that no longer exists: in church terms, you are now a BSRA – a Bog Standard Regular Adult.

So wherever your work is based, look for a church quickly. Make sure the cross is central, the Bible is taught, it is outward looking and a genuine, loving Christian community – but don’t expect it to be identical to the church you have come from. If you are working in London, or in another main city centre, investigate whether there is any mid-week ministry for workers organized by a church or group of churches near to where you work. The best place to find out is the TransformWork UK website, www.transformworkuk.org.

If possible, make sure you take part in some form of small group or accountability group where the challenges of being a Christian at work are discussed. When I started out at work, I started a prayer square with three other close Christian friends. Over ten years later, we are still meeting. It has been invaluable to be able to pray with and be accountable to others about all manner of things, including our time spent at work.

Practise being a godly steward of your resources

All we have has ultimately been given to us by God – our time, our money, our gifts. So as you start out at work, as far as possible, work out a wise balance between time at work, time at church, time with friends, time with family and so on. Be wary of work commitments ballooning to such an extent that it becomes impossible to spend sufficient time with friends and family and at church. But also be wary of being so busy at church that you are unable to build meaningful relationships with people at work.

Think through the use of your money too. It ...

Table of contents

• Working without Wilting
• CONTENTS
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Working without wilting
• Part 1 Work is a treadmill
• 1. Stepping onto the treadmill
• 2. Keeping going on the treadmill
• 3. Stepping off the treadmill
• Part 2 Work is a trampoline
• 4. Keeping your balance
• 5. Surviving the ups and downs
• Part 3 Work like a trout
• 6. Against the flow character
• 7. Against the flow relationships
• 8. Against the flow with money
• 9. Against the flow with stress
• Part 4 Work like a trumpet
• 10. Glorifying God at work
• 11. Serving God at work
• 12. Worshipping God at work
• Conclusion Work – viewed through a Tardis
• Notes