If you’ve had the heart-stopping experience of nearly colliding with another vehicle that was in your blind spot, you understand what it means to look but not really see. 

Nicole had been coaching her friend Joyce on some simple steps she could take to begin to turn life into ministry. “One of the things you need to do is to slow down enough to actually see people,” Nicole said, so Joyce decided to give this a try.

Standing in line at the bank, she noticed an older Asian man in line ahead of her who seemed to be having trouble filling out a form. Joyce offered to help him, and he accepted. She thought, Wow, that felt good. I can do this! As Joyce and the man walked out of the bank, she turned to say goodbye and tell him she was happy to have met him. She had just begun to tell him her name when he said, “I know who you are.”

Surprised, she asked, “You do?” 

His reply stunned her.

“Yes, you are the lady who comes in my store every Tuesday to buy fish.” 

She had shopped in his store for months, yet had never truly seen him. What was simply a business transaction to her was something else to this shopkeeper. Joyce’s task-orientation was a huge blind spot in her desire to live like Jesus.

So how do we begin to love Mondays the way God loves Mondays, and leverage our everyday work for the kingdom?

To effectively turn our work into full-time ministry, we must begin to see people. We must slow down and prioritize relationships. In our increasingly impersonal society, that is a major challenge! Loving God with all our hearts may even seem easy by comparison. But loving our neighbors or our co-workers as ourselves can be a real stretch. Yet unless we do so, cultivating a growing relationship with God and a work ethic of excellence and integrity will be of negligible value. People will not open up or listen to us if there’s no relationship.

Like Joyce, we must learn that work is not merely about a business transaction. It’s about seeing people. That doesn’t mean we steal work time from our bosses to socialize. But it means we look people in the eye and smile when we greet them. It means taking time to eat lunch with someone rather than always staying at our desks. It means staying late to help a co-worker move their stuff when we notice they’re changing offices. It means getting a couple extra tickets for the ballgame and inviting a co-worker to go along. 

God loves Mondays, the day when millions of people come together for work, because God loves people. When you model His love for people, His love for Mondays will become yours, too.

Read Part 1.
Read Part 2.