Profitable Work!

At my last job, my employer had all the employees account for every 15 minute block of the day. While this is a common practice in fields such as law and accounting, I had never come across it in my line of business: computer networking. Learning this system was a pain in the beginning…and in the end and all points in between. I would much rather have been working on some technical issue beyond my understanding or with a problematic customer. But nonetheless there was no getting around it.

During the course of this exercise I was forced to look critically at what I did during the day at all times. Naturally it should go without saying that the boss was interested in a term that I became intimately familiar with–“billable hours.” This was time that the company was able to charge the customer for work that I did. With this realization, I quickly came to some conclusions about the typical work environment.

First was that when someone says that they are “busy” that does not necessarily mean that they are “working.” When someone says that they are “working” it does not necessarily mean that they are being “profitable.” When I was being micro-managed, I suddenly became accountable for everything that I was doing for the company and it really made me consider my every action.

As we come into the Passover season we need to be asking ourselves this same thing–even more seriously than we have been doing throughout the past year. If we say that we are busy, are we busy laboring and striving, not in vain, but according to the good work that God has begun in us (Philippians 1:6; 2:6 )? If we say that we are working, are we doing a work which is good and profitable (Titus 3:8)? Only each one of us individually can answer these questions and we must do so carefully and prayerfully as we will soon have to give an account (1 Peter 4:5).