Finding God at Work

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...

One of the most powerful ways we can love our teammates is praying for them. In this episode, we'll look at four ways to pray: For the work For the workers Without words With your teammates God cares about the work and the ones who are doing it; he's happy for us to come to him in prayer with the mundane concerns of our normal workdays. When we do, we find we're better able to collaborate with him...

No one you work with is dealing with *too much* encouragement today. And you're better positioned than most people on the planet to specifically encourage your teammates. When we look at the Bible, encouragement isn't icing on the cake. It's essential strength for the work God has given us. One of the most practical ways you can love your teammates is by encouraging them well. An acronym to help y...

"Vibe coding" caught my attention recently: using AI tools to produce code and putting it into production in public-facing apps, without a human coder building anything. I was both intrigued and horrified to learn of such a thing. To better explore my intrigue and horror, I figured I'd give it a shot. Behold, Mission Moment , a fully vibe-coded web app from Mission Central! #VibeCoding #AI #Claude...

Saint John Paul II (or JP2, as we theology nerds affectionately call him), once said, "the human person. . . is a creature that God willed for his own sake. At the same time, he can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself." You only find out who you are when you give yourself away. That's part of what it means to be a person. A person, rather than, say, a machine.  This ra...

Studies show that happier workers are less likely to look for other jobs. That makes sense. But the joy that Jesus invites us into is even deeper than that. It's a joy that goes hand-in-hand with self-sacrifice, with service that sometimes hurts. In Philippians 2, Paul speaks of this kind of joy as he compares himself to a "drink offering" that is "being poured out" for others (v. 17, NIV). Jesus...

Sometimes, Jesus doesn't give us much data about what he asks us to do. He shows us a next step, but not a complete roadmap. Jesus gives us a way to serve, but not the full picture of what he plans to accomplish through our service. In the story of Jesus at the wedding at Cana, we see how this dynamic works in the experience of the servants. Jesus asks them to do a hefty task, but doesn't tell the...

The discipline of service helps us grow in humility, and humility makes us ready to serve. It's a reciprocal relationship. The same is true for service and courage: When we make a habit of serving, we find ourselves willing to do the right thing even when it's risky. And there are some kinds of service that require great risk! The story of Esther helps us discern when we've been called to our work...

Doing our work out of the motivation of service makes it meaningful in three different ways: Our work contributes to the common good . Our work images God in the world Our work is the stuff of salvation . We're saved through faith, not by earning God's favor. But when we lean into what it means to "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling" as "God . . .  works in you," we see a...

Sometimes job postings list "progressively responsible work experience" among the prerequisites for a position. It means they're looking for someone who's taken on more and more responsibility over time, someone who has an arc to their career pointing upward. It's not necessarily a bad thing to be entrusted with more when you've done well with little. Jesus endorses that model. But he also shows u...