Letters to a Friend

Sometimes, our work can be challenging. We get frustrated with a coworker, our tasks become mundane, a leadership change shakes the stable ground beneath us, we lose an opportunity. There are many ways that our work can feel like a burden. Even when we believe that work is good, that God’s original design was for us to join him in His work of caring for and stewarding the world around us, we experience the reality of brokenness in our work every day.

What wisdom is there for us in these moments and seasons?

The “Letters to a Friend” blog series is a series of encouragements rooted in biblical wisdom written specifically for those wrestling with challenges around work. Many of these challenges feel so visceral that we need something deeper than advice or explanations – something more like an encouraging letter from a friend. Our prayer is that these letters encourage you with wisdom from Scripture, reminding you that God is with you in this very place of challenge.

Perhaps one of these letters will encourage or equip you to write your own letter to a friend who needs this kind of encouragement right now.

Letter #1: To a Friend Who Is Frustrated at Work for Reasons Beyond Their Control

Dear One,

I hope you are well on this beautiful spring afternoon. It is Holy Week, and I have been thinking of you since our last conversation about the frustrations you’re feeling at work. I wanted to write you this letter a few weeks ago, but each time I’ve tried, I’ve been met with the weighty sense that I have little advice to offer and no neat certainty about “what God is doing.” I hate that my desire to give you some packaged deliverable prevented me from just encouraging you – you may be feeling that from others in your life during this season of frustration. I know I have before.

I grieve that you’ve been so frustrated at work for reasons beyond your control recently – it sounds like supervisors are making decisions you don’t understand, putting you in a frustrating bind… You can’t understand the why, yet you realize you must “get with the picture” to lead your team with integrity. It’s clear to me that your love for Jesus is fueling your love for those team members – I hope you can see how God is using you even now to sharpen them, protect their jobs, serve their families, and seek the good of our city. 

You’re not alone in this feeling of frustration. I see it in the news all around us. I hear it in stories from other friends and feel it in my own soul. So much is beyond my control, and it’s frustrating when I don’t understand or agree with it. It’s painful, like the “intolerable shirt of flame” about which T.S. Eliot writes in “The Four Quartets.”

Jesus is palpably and profoundly with you in this! Have you considered recently how Jesus was subjected to forces beyond his control? Henri Nouwen’s essay, “From Action to Passion,” reminded me of this the other day. 

“Early in the morning, all the chief priests and the elders of the people made their plans how to have Jesus executed. So they bound him, led him away and handed him over to Pilate the governor.” (Mt. 27:1-2)

Jesus was handed over. 

Our God is inexplicably near to you in this frustration because Christ himself was there: subject to the plans of others, prey to agendas aimed against flourishing, victim of the greatest force beyond our control – death itself.

How I wish I could devise a path out of this frustration. I can’t claim to know what lies on the other side of this season. But I’m struck this week by the hope and prayer that you will see our crucified King in surprising times and places right alongside you under the burden of forces beyond your control. 

I’m so often tempted to lash out against this, or just give up and embrace cynicism. Oh, how I pray our God strengthens you against both of these. To look carefully at the anger you feel without embracing violence is just as hard as taking an honest account of the helplessness you feel without surrendering all meaning to the darkness.

I need Jesus to help me walk faithfully on that hard road – you do too. I know He wants to meet us there if we have eyes to see. 

Jesus is inviting you to be more like Him. You’ve already been such a picture of Christlikeness to me in this life that I am excited to consider how He is making you more like Himself even now. His love is the only power that can remove that “intolerable shirt of flame,” loose the bonds of sin and death, and break the chains that you feel binding you in your vocation now.

If there’s ever a time to imagine and rejoice in how Christ has broken those chains and set us free from every force and power beyond our control, it’s Good Friday and Easter. Jesus’s vocation wasn’t fulfilled until he embraced the powerlessness of betrayal and arrest – may we have eyes to see how He is redeeming our vocations amidst frustrations of powerlessness.

Know that you are on my heart over this weekend. I pray for you with deep affection and hope.

We are Together in Christ,

Rh