Your Work Might be Worthless
My husband works as a pastor and a decent portion of his work is in youth ministry. The results of youth ministry are often not very tangible. It is a rare occasion when a youth group member will thank him for something he’s done. But just this last week, he heard (secondhand) that one of his high school students thinks our youth group is the best youth group in the city. “I’ve been to a lot of youth groups,” he said. “And ours tops them all.” Only one superlative comment like that in nearly five years of faithful work.
Faithful ministry doesn’t necessarily yield abundant and obvious results. I was encouraged by this excerpt from a letter that Thomas Merton wrote to a social activist ( The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters by Thomas Merton):
“Do not depend on hope of results.
When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on,
essentially an apostolic work,
you may have to face the fact
that your work will be apparently worthless
and even achieve no results at all,
if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect…“The big results are not in your hands or mine,
but they suddenly happen,
and we can share in them;
but there is no point in building our lives
on this personal satisfaction,
which may be denied us and
which after all is not that important…”All the good that you do will not come from you
but from the fact that you have allowed yourself,
in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love…
If you can get free from the domination of causes
and just serve Christ’s truth,
you will be able to do more
and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments.“The real hope then is not in something we think we can do,
but in God who is making something good out of it
In some way we cannot see.”
Whatever God is calling you to, I pray that your service to Christ’s truth rest at the center of your work and the center of your heart.
And I wonder: What role does the ‘hope of results’ play in your work and life?
The mission statement where I work is this: “We carry on the healing mission of Jesus Christ by promoting personal and community health, relieving pain and suffering, and treating each person in a loving and caring way. ” It seems rather ideal, but isn’t that cool?
As far as results of this work, they are constantly being measured. If I give someone pain medication I am required to first ask him to rate his pain using a number from 1-10. Then after a designated period of time (depending on the medication) I then go back and ask him to rate his pain again so that I can measure the improvement. So many parts of my job envolve measurment of change. A huge frustration and feeling of failure is when that expected change isn’t seen, or isn’t understood.
It’s funny to think of how different our jobs are while at the same time being so similar in the core of what we do. “We carry on the healing mission of Jesus Christ”