Finding God at Work

Have you ever gone birdwatching? Those who are really adept birders often bring binoculars and know all of the names of even the obscure birds. They've trained themselves to be attentive to where the birds are, and know what time of year different birds come to their area. Chris and Katie aren't adept birders, but when they go on walks together in Aurora, they often see birds and point them out to...

Do you know the Golden Rule? Jesus teaches it in the Gospels: "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Luke 6:31 NIV).   Back when Chris worked at a mortgage company, he heard a senior manager tell someone a different version: "He who has the gold makes the rules." This leader was letting business culture disciple him more than he was letting Jesus disciple him.   As followers of Jesus, we...

In a couple words, how would you describe the best coworker you've ever had? Maybe kind , honest or hard-working . Now, how about the worst coworker you've ever had? Those words might be harder to come by. We don't tend to use terms like slothful , cruel or proud these days.   In Western culture, we've slowly lost the ability to describe other people's character, which has in turn compromised our...

Chris interviews Bonnie Kristian, author and deputy editor at Christianity Today , on her new book In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers . The book addresses the intersection of faith and evangelicalism with public life.   When we hear the phrase "public life," we often think of politics, but it also includes how businesses serve the public, which Bonnie examines throu...

Have you ever made a fantastic investment? Maybe it's your retirement savings, a mutual fund, or a beautiful set of Cutco knives. When Chris was a little kid, he asked his dad to buy him stock in a company called World Air, and he doubled his money in the first six months! But Chris' second attempt at investing didn't go so well. This time it was 2007, and he asked his dad to buy him stock in Buil...

When you receive a birthday or anniversary card, you often see two sets of writing: the elegantly worded section from the author at the card company, and a personal, handwritten note from the person giving you the card. Which part of the card carries more meaning for you? The handwritten note! While it may not be as elegantly worded as the printed message on the card, it carries a deeper weight be...

What do you think you'll do on a normal workday 10,000 years from now? In the new heavens and the new earth, we'll be working. We often think of the new heavens and the new earth as a setting of rest and celebration, but the truth is that work—good work!—will also be part of our lives in the age to come. God gave us work before the fall; it's part of his good design for human life.   But have you...

Have you ever had to slow down to keep pace with someone else? In this episode of Finding God at Work, Chris considers when love requires us to put on the brakes. Drawing on Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("the grandeur of humanity"), Chris celebrates the pope's prophetic clarity for our fast-paced marketplace, confronting our obsession with maximizing efficiency at the cost...

When we evaluate the vitality of a local church, we typically count heads in pews, measure annual giving, or analyze Sunday volunteer teams. But what happens when a pastor steps back and realizes that his congregation spends forty, fifty, or sixty hours a week in an entirely different domain? For Tom Nelson, former lead pastor of Christ Community Church in Kansas City and founder of Made to Flouri...

When preparing to lay the brick and mortar for a new business facility, the engineers and architects make sure the foundation is structurally secure. But when FONA International built its headquarters in Geneva, Illinois, founder Joe Slawek added a beautifully literal foundation: before the concrete was poured, employees placed Bibles beneath the floors of key offices, conference rooms, and factor...

For many driven professionals, the cultural prescription for career success is simple: push harder, move faster, and accumulate more. We wrap our identities in our productivity, white-knuckling our way through demanding schedules until we find ourselves completely trapped in a toxic cycle of exhaustion.   Alissa Crouse knew this reality intimately. At forty years old, navigating a season of intens...

Few things crush a professional ego faster than throwing your entire heart into a project, only to watch it completely flop. Chris knows that feeling! In the early days of Mission Central, he spent weeks making phone calls, sending LinkedIn messages, and pulling every relational lever he had to launch a leadership cohort, only for the registration numbers to settle at a devastating zero. In moment...

How would you explain the meaning of a kiss to an alien who had never seen one?   You could describe it anatomically, of course, or define it abstractly as a symbol of romantic affection. But a kiss isn't experienced as a mere abstraction. It doesn't just represent love; it physically communicates and accomplishes it. It is an embodied, affectionate human act that brings a hidden internal reality...

Many of us look at the word entrepreneur and picture a distinct archetype: a natural risk-taker, someone driven by economic opportunities and a lifelong dream of building an enterprise from the ground up. But what happens when the calling to build a business comes not from long-standing ambition, but from a quiet, practical necessity to sustain a deeper mission?   You become a reluctant entreprene...

Have you ever been sitting in a church service, looked down at the bulletin to see the morning's scripture reading, and internally gasped, "Oh no, not that passage?"   Whether it is a dense theological directive on submission, the daunting call of the Great Commission, or Jesus' uncompromising standard for radical forgiveness, we all have scripture tripping points. We encounter instructions that c...

We have a habit of building beautiful, sacred structures and then assuming they will take care of themselves. In our excitement to build the "new, shiny thing," we frequently forget the quiet, unglamorous work of taking care of what God has already entrusted to us. We build sanctuaries for worship, but we leave the deferred maintenance to pile up until the structure itself begins to dictate, and l...

Not long ago, Chris and his wife Katie—a hospice nurse practitioner—were watching an intense emergency room drama called The Pitt . In one scene, the doctors run a series of lab tests on a critical patient and one of them calls out the results: a potassium level of 12.2. Katie immediately gasped in horror. Chris, completely unfamiliar with medical metrics, assumed 12.2 sounded low, perhaps out of...

If you grew up in church, you've likely heard about the noble woman of Proverbs 31. She is a staple of Mother's Day sermons and home-decor plaques, usually praised for her domestic devotion and tireless care for her family. But if we look closer at the text, we find a description that sounds less like a domestic archetype and more like a savvy CEO.   This woman is an entrepreneur. She considers a...

When Chris was in the fourth grade, he traveled to Texas for a cousin's wedding and experienced a minor ecclesiastical crisis. Having grown up in an Anglican tradition, Chris was used to robes, incense, and liturgy, and he was deeply disturbed to find the Baptist pastor at his cousin's church wearing a simple three-piece suit. To a ten-year-old Chris, it wasn't just a stylistic choice; it felt lik...

When Chris was growing up in the nineties, the shopping mall was a vibrant center of life. He remembers the special birthdays when his "adopted" grandmother, Louise, would take him to the mall to pick out a gift. He doesn't remember the toys he chose, but he remembers the gift of her presence. Today, walking through many of those same malls feels different. They have become eerily empty; husks of...

A few years ago, Chris attended a retirement party for Mr. Clum, his childhood school principal. In a room filled with people celebrating a long career, they didn't spend much time talking about enrollment numbers, new buildings, or administrative growth. Instead, they talked about how Mr. Clum loved people. They remembered how he, as a six-foot-seven man, would get down on his knee to talk to a c...

Note: We had a one-time recording snafu for this episode, so the audio quality is not what we'd like to share. It's back to normal in future episodes!   When Chris was seven years old, his uncles John and Dan noticed something: he was a wiggly kid. He was always beating out rhythms on tables or tapping on his stomach. So, for Christmas, they gave him a Yamaha digital drum kit.   What Chris remembe...

Is your "to-do" list gnawing at your soul?   We all have a "Get-To / Have-To" mix at work. Even in a dream job, there's a percentage of our day—whether it's 10% or 90%—filled with tasks that feel tedious, repetitive, or even unfair. When we feel forced into work that drains our energy , the result is almost always resentment .   In this episode, Chris Easley explores how to reclaim your interior f...

When we're in the middle of a painful stretch in our lives, it can be easy to turn inward, focusing on our own suffering while ignoring others. Or we can run away from the pain instead of facing it. But Jesus shows us a different way. In Luke's account of his last night with his disciples and the day of his crucifixion, we see Jesus' attitude in the face of suffering: I'm ready for this. I don't h...

T.S. Eliot once wrote of "strained time-ridden faces / Distracted from distraction by distraction". Do you ever feel distracted from distraction by distraction? Why is it so easy for us to get distracted? Part of it is our busy world. But perhaps the more important part is in us: Our tendency to become distractible. One of the best ways we can love our teammates is by giving them real attention. T...