God’s Blessing: It is possible to enjoy hard work.
What follows is a speech I gave to the K-12 faculty of during preservice professional development, 14 August 2024.
Good morning, colleagues. This summer, I’ve been reflecting on the beautiful ways God blesses good work. Before I begin, I want to confess that it feels a bit intimidating to share my reflections with all of you because I’ve worked at AACS for more than a decade, and most of that was during my twenties. Like most twenty-somethings, I made a lot of foolish mistakes, and I can only imagine how that might shape a person’s reputation over time. So, instead of talking about me, I want to ease in by talking about the winner of the 2012 AACS Timothy Award, my friend Mike.
Mike Lentz is no stranger to some of you. In addition to graduating from this school, Mike taught at AACS from 2017 to 2022, and he still contracts with AACS to film and produce video content from time to time. Mike is a documentary filmmaker. Mike’s work is consistently beautiful and excellent. While it isn’t always explicitly religious in nature, you can sense patterns of redemption and restoration in the stories Mike tells.
Two summers ago, I found kittens in my neighbor’s Baltimore City backyard. This incident was the impetus for Mike’s 2022 short documentary Cats for Miles.
Here’s the trailer:
I spent the summer of 2022 fostering four kittens until they were all adopted just before the start of the school year.
It was beautiful, adorable, disgusting, time-consuming, and something I hope I never have to do again. Mike’s film tells the story of the kittens and other kittens like them. But I’m going to tell you about the mother cat,
who I named Gloria the first time I saw her because she looked like an angel.
After the kittens were brought inside, the Feline Rescue Association lent me a trap to catch Gloria so that she could be spayed. Because she had grown up outdoors and didn’t trust humans, we decided to re-release her in my backyard after the surgery. She spent the next 24 hours prowling the area, howling with her whole being while searching for her missing kittens, who could hear her through the wall from their comfortable, air-conditioned kennel. To be honest, it was heartbreaking.
I need to pause for a moment to tell you that I am not a cat person. I love animals, I grew up with a dog,
and I believe God calls humans to care for creation. But I don’t feel a particular passion for cats. That said, as a result of a sequence of life events that I won’t enumerate now, I have had two cats of my own for the past 13 years — Tina and Shark.
Because I’ve got cats of my own, I always have cat food on hand. And because of my heartbroken guilt at stealing Gloria’s babies, I decided the least I could do was provide her with food. This quickly became a routine.
I would come downstairs in the morning and see Gloria sitting outside the back door on the deck. I’d open the door, and she would hide under the deck, waiting for me to fill her bowl and leave. Then, when I was back inside, she would pop back up on the deck for her feast. Cat person or not, there’s something particularly beautiful about caring for another.
Two weeks ago I sent this text…
to a group of friends who have been invested in the story of Gloria and her kittens.
After reflecting on the fruit of my caretaking, I sent a second text 29 minutes later.
This summer, the Upper School faculty have been reading sections from David I. Smith and Susan M. Felch’s book Teaching and Christian Imagination,
which illuminates the vocation of teaching through three different metaphors. This summer we have been reading about “Gardens” as a metaphor for our work as teachers.
Human beings were created to live in a garden. A garden is a space of beauty and abundance designed for human beings to cultivate and delight in right relationships with God, one another, and the created world.
As God creates the universe in the Genesis 1 narrative, he establishes boundaries within the created order: day vs. night, land vs. sea. And this culminates in Genesis 1:27–28:
This is the cultural mandate.
This summer, our seniors read an excerpt from Lisa Sharon Harper’s The Very Good Gospel. She illuminates the following Scriptural passage in Genesis 2:
Dominion — stewardship — looks like serving and protecting the rest of creation. It is caretaking.
A school’s culture is like a garden to be cared for, and all the learning that happens in a school is like the fruit of a well-maintained garden. Students are apprentice gardeners, who learn from and alongside teachers.
If our work is like gardening, then it is difficult work. Doing the work well requires a finely-honed set of skills. Great school employees, like great gardeners, understand and use best practices to achieve their desired results. But the longer you teach in a school, the more you learn that even the best best practices fall short or even become irrelevant over time. This is because schools, like gardens, are complex ecosystems. One change to one variable can have drastic implications.
A particularly hot summer — or a sequence of increasingly hot summers like we’ve had lately — might mean that plants that once flourished may now whither. Daily watering may be the best practice for cultivating a flourishing garden. But, daily watering might not be enough in the middle of a drought.
And on the flip side, continued daily watering might actually drown a plant if Tropical Storm Debby is passing through the area.
I learned several effective teaching strategies at the start of my career, but that was before smartphones and overprotective parenting caused Gen Z and Gen Alpha to be labeled “The Anxious Generations,”
and those strategies became less effective for teaching students with shortened attention spans and increasing mental health challenges.
And we get to teach those distracted, anxious students with this…
going on.
And this:
Working in a school, like cultivating a garden, is never easy. It requires finely honed skills. It requires sensitivity to ever-shifting variables. Which requires school employees to adapt their skills, set aside the ones that have become ineffective, and continually learn new skills and strategies.
What’s the point?
The point is that our labors glorify God. Teaching is hard work, and we never feel like we’ve done it perfectly, but it is good work to do.
At AACS, we engage students in an education of excellence, enabling them to impact the world through a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.
But that’s not the entire point. Because, as the Westminster Catechism teaches,
The point is to work and to delight in the presence of God.
My two years of work feeding Gloria was worth it because my effort to care for God’s creature brings God glory. But it is also worth it because my sustained effort eventually led to a small, important moment of beauty and delight in my relationship with Gloria, gifted to us both by God. But that relationship was only possible with sustained effort. It took me two years to build enough trust to scratch Gloria’s head. This video is from July 30. It was the first time this ever happened. It now happens daily.
I believe it is possible to enjoy excellent work that glorifies God. And to continuously grow and adapt to the changes and difficulties we navigate in a world marred by sin. And to do it with steadfast joy.
And when we do, God will bless the work.
At my church’s Great Vigil of Easter this past spring, I was reminded that God blesses human work when I heard Pulitzer Prize winning American composer Caroline Shaw’s piece “And the Swallow”,
a setting of Psalm 84. I want to play it for you. This performance features the Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge, under the direction of Anna Lapwood, a world-famous conductor, composer, and organist.
“And the Swallow” loosely outlines the story of redemption. It begins with Creation. We are in Eden, and all the voices are singing in homophonic synchronization:
“How beloved is your dwelling place, O Lord.” Then, Shaw nods to God’s creational boundary-setting when the parts divide into low and high voices,
evoking Adam and Eve. The opening section culminates in a flourish of diverse groups of voices singing ascending melodic fragments, rising upward as if prayers.
This moment features sighing musical motifs, often used by composers to suggest rest and peace.
I believe the fragile birds referenced in the text have a double meaning. They are literal created beings, living in harmony and at peace. But they also strike me as personifications of the creation mandate: be fruitful, multiply.
Just past the halfway point of the piece, we arrive at the Valley of Bakka —
literally the valley of “weeping” in the Bible. This is a desolate place, a reminder of the Fall and of sin. The psalmist, though, writes that this valley is made into a place of springs by the human beings passing through.
The Valley of Bakka becomes a garden through the good, difficult, beautiful work of human beings.
The piece ends with a hum.
Peace. Beauty. And a reminder that God blesses our labors. The people made the valley a place of springs, a garden. But God…
sends “the autumn rains to cover it with pools.”
As you listen, remember that you exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Maybe you will choose to do that with your body, closing your eyes and breathing deeply as you rest while the music plays. Maybe you will choose to glorify God with your mind, tracking the story and the construction of the music. Maybe you will glorify God with your heart, basking in the beauty. You might glorify God with your spirit, using the time to pray for your colleagues and students. Or perhaps you’ll choose some combination of those options.
But I hope that as you glorify God with your body, mind, heart, or spirit, you will also remember to enjoy God and hold fast to the promise that he will bless your work this year — whether filmmaking, or caretaking, or gardening, or teaching, or composing, or performing, or any other good, difficult redemptive labor you pursue. Our Head of School will come up to the stage when the piece concludes, but for now, listen, glorify God, and enjoy God in this beautiful garden we call Annapolis Area Christian School.
I often use AI to assist with early drafting and structuring, but the ideas, content, style, and final writing are entirely my own.
