When you think of God’s design for work, you can align it with a calling that is worthy of your time and effort. Genesis 1:28 gives us the guardrails to start “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
We start with God’s blessing. Everything we do is through God. We go out to do work in an identity that is from a place of God’s blessing. We then are in a place where we can seek to bless others through His good design.
To be fruitful and multiply points to our co-creator status. We have dominion over the domain that God has given to us, whether that is our work, our home, our little sphere of the world that we influence and are being influenced by. We can create new humans, in God’s design, through a loving, monogamous marriage in which we can fully glorify God. We multiply and fill the earth both with our physical presence and our co-created people…our kids…as well as with our call to bring God’s kingdom in greater measure to the world in our present experiences.
When you consider what it means to ‘subdue it’ in particular, we certainly have been given a degree of authority over the world. We can trash it or we can support it. And we must look to more of a ‘cultivation of it’ to help it grow and to see that it thrives.
3 Categories of Meaningful Work Calling
The Barna group explained in their book Faith for Exiles how they interviewed young adults about desires for work and found they aspire to three different types of work. It just so happens that those three different kinds of work align with how God designed work to be. The three big buckets were:
- entrepreneurship
- science-minded roles
- creative roles
God calls all humans and believers to align with bringing order to chaos, and pursuing good over evil, to glorify God in through our cultivation in three specific ways that correlate to different work and career opportunities. We seek to:
- create beauty (creative)
- cultivate abundance (entrepreneur)
- generate order (science-minded)
Creating beauty aligns with creative careers, cultivating abundance is potentially an entrepreneurial endeavor, and generating order is typically a STEM career. Of course, all of us can be advocates for all three and dabble in a little bit of everything, but many of us pick a category to devote our lives to based on our personality, our likes and dislikes, and our skills. This is a good thing to consider and weigh where you sit in these three? Do you gravitate to one area or another? You can aspire to many types of careers or areas of interest so it’s not necessarily defined to only one of these buckets. But it helps identify direction in a calling about which you might want to develop some mastery as you pursue a career.
The imagination is a beautiful thing. You might consider a mixture of practical, statistical, or imaginative interests and curiosities. Faith for Exiles provides examples like this, “Ask any child what they want to be when they grow up, and you’ll get practical answers (doctor, lawyer, teacher), statistical anomalies (astronaut, professional athlete), and the downright fanciful (unicorn tamer, time traveler, superhero, owner of a butterfly store).” We are dreamers from the beginning.
We use this basic construct to understand the human mind but also develop it. At a foundational level we understand the importance and value of an education for our children to love learning in the three categories of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The construct of three finds itself in many of the concepts that are crucial to our existence.
Years ago I wrote a personal mission statement, before I understood the three categories of work. It went like this: “use my creativity to draw others to God and encourage them into their own God given creativity”. And in considering where my interests have gravitated to, it has typically been in the creative arts. Even now, in digital marketing, I simply provide insights in doing research and understanding performance for my clients campaigns. I am a creative at heart. Though I dabble in analytics which could be science-minded and also entrepreneurial because I have been known to pursue ideas that are new and unique ways to look at the world and to serve people. But ultimately, I am interested in creativity!
Take some time to consider where your interests are and you will certainly see some themes that help you know how you can enter the work world with purpose and mission as you consider the impact you can make.