I came across this article on the front page of one of my seminary notebooks. Dr. Mark Minnick in a seminary class on preaching. I remember receiving a challenge on first reading it and again received that challenge. I thought I would pass it on to you!
“No man does any work perfectly who does not enjoy his work. Joy in one’s work is the consummate tool without which the work may be done indeed but which the work will always be done slowly clumsily and without its finest perfectness. Men who do work without enjoying it are like men carving with hatchets. The statue gets carved perhaps and a monument forever of the dogged perseverance of artist but there is a perpetual waste of toil and is no fine result in the end. A man who does his with thorough enjoyment of it is like an artist who holds an exquisite tool which is almost as obedient to him as his own hand and seems to understand what he is doing and almost works intelligently with him.
I passed the other day a pawn broker’s shop in an obscure street here in our city. Its windows showed the usual shabby and wretched refuse which belongs to such places, but one window was a great deal sadder than the other. In the first window there were tawdry and faded trinkets, old jewelry and bits of cheap personal finery which poverty had confiscated from their desperate or careless owners, but in the other window there were piles of workmen’s tools hammers and saws and planes and files and axes the things with which men do their work and earn their living. That was the sadder window of the two. To lose a trinket is mortification and disappointment but to lose a tool may be ruin. And so if joy in work were a mere polish and decoration of life it would be sad that man should not have it but if it is the means by which alone the work of life may be effectively and nobly done then its loss may be the very loss of life itself.
To do your work because you must to do your work as a slavery; and then having got it done as speedily and easily as possible to look somewhere else for enjoyment that makes a very dreary life. No man who works so does the best work. No man who works so lingers lovingly over his work and asks himself if there is not something he can do to make it more perfect.
Try just as far as possible to find the pleasure of your life in the work to which it has been settled that your life must be given. Study its principles. Let your interest dwell on its details. Make it delightful by the affections which cluster round it by the help which you are able through it to give to other people by the education which your own faculties are getting out of it. Then you will not be running everywhere to find some outside pleasure which shall make up to you for your self sacrificing toil but the scenes of your self sacrificing toil itself your store or your office or your work bench shall be bright with associations of delight and vocal with your thankfulness to the God who has given you in them the most radiant revelations of Himself.”
– From The Candle of the Lord, “The Joy of Self Sacrifice,” by Phillips Brooks