To work heartily is to work with one’s emotions fully engaged in support of one’s work. This part III of the series on working heartily addresses the role of one’s emotions in working wholeheartedly.
Why your emotions matter
Perhaps the best evidence of the importance of our emotions in doing our work heartily is that the team with the best winning percentage in any professional sports league is the home team. The cheering fans stirs and emboldens the emotions, and hence the effort, of the home team. The cheering lifts the emotions of a player that comes into a game flat and can flatten the emotions of the opposing team. If we all had to work in front of cheering or booing spectators we would also see dramatic swings in our performance at work.
Emotions are also important because they can be so detrimental to our work. A common question is, “Can I work ‘wholeheartedly’ when I don’t feel joy in doing my job?” The short answer is “No, you can’t.” Think of your heart as a three-legged stool consisting of your mind, will, and emotions. If only two are in alignment, the stool is not going to function the way it was intended. That doesn’t mean you can’t do a good job; you still can, but it is considerably more difficult to do so.
Our emotions also affect our witness. I once worked with an administrative staff employee whose facial expression was always dour. Her face was a stone wall. As a result, I always felt uncomfortable asking her for anything. I was shocked after a few years to see something on her desk indicating she was a Christian.
Then, I spent some time talking with her at one of our annual Christmas parties, and I thought I was talking to a different person. She was friendly, smiling, and outgoing. So, she wasn’t perpetually miserable. She was apparently only that way at work. As a result, though, no non-Christian coworker was likely to approach her to find out more about God.
Our emotions matter in our work, and here is the thing: they are not going anywhere. We are emotional beings. There is no need pretending emotions don’t exist or that they don’t affect us. We must learn to live with them but in the way we were created to, not as their slaves but mostly their masters. In those situations when we can’t master them we must learn to work around them.
The goal
The goal then is three-pronged.
First, we want to remove the emotional opposition to work in general. That is one of the goals of Work in the Kingdom, but it is too broad a subject for a single post. It starts, however, with understanding that, as creatures created in the image of a God, who is a worker, we are created to work. Work is not a result of the curse but was there in the beginning in the paradise of the Garden of Eden. Work is part of paradise on earth.
Second, we want to learn to deal with emotional opposition in our job, in the task we have been given to do, and in the moment. We can learn how our emotions detract from our work and how to corral those emotions.
Third, we want to learn how to cultivate and leverage positive emotions to assist us in our work. We want to work like the home team, emotionally invested and inspired.
The challenge
The challenge is that emotions are the most undependable of the heart triad. They are fleeting and fickle but not feckless. When we want them they are are nowhere to be found. When we do not want them, they will not go away. But no one can deny the power of emotion.
Artists tend to be most dependent on their emotions in their work. They work bizarre hours because they are waiting for the inspiration, and they are notoriously unreliable in meeting deadlines.
Yet, good writers will tell you writing is a discipline and that some of their best work occurred when they did not want to write but wrote out of discipline. In this example, is a key to dealing with emotions that oppose or fail to assist us in our work.
Dealing with negative emotions
So, what do I do when I don’t feel like working wholeheartedly or when I don’t feel like working at all?
The most counterintuitive truth about emotions is that they are better followers than leaders. They rarely motivate us to start working and often oppose us, but once we start, they surrender to our will and support us. They are like the recalcitrant child who goes kicking and screaming, but after a while is skipping and laughing.
Other times, the best way to deal with negative emotions is to cultivate positive emotions in their place.
Cultivating positive emotions
The Bible teaches an effective way to cultivate positive emotions, and that is through thankful prayer. See Philippians 4:6-7. Thanking the Lord we have a job and can earn the money is a good place to start. So many people want to work but can’t find a job; others are physically unable to work. As a result, they cannot provide for themselves or their families and are dependent on others or the government.
We can also thank the Lord for those things about our job that we do enjoy.
All this thankfulness brings perspective, and perspective allays destructive emotions. The promised residue of thankful prayer is peace. Philippians 4:7. While peace is not the same as passion, it at least creates an emotionally level playing field from which to work.
The Bible also gives some rather simple advice that is applicable here: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” Philippians 4:4. “Always” certainly includes our work, and that the Bible commands rejoicing means rejoicing is possible even when we are not up to it emotionally. This implies we have more control over our emotions than we probably believe. Choosing to rejoice is an act of the will that corrals our emotions.
In short, we must work at getting our emotions in alignment with our work, but it is possible.
An illustration
Understanding how to corral our emotions to inspire us is best shown by example.
Few scenes have stuck in my mind so vividly about what means to work wholeheartedly and rejoice in our work than a scene from the the 1981 move, The Chariots of Fire. The movie is the true story of Olympic athlete and later Christian missionary, Eric Liddell.
The scene is from a race where another runner shoves Liddell off the track during the race. Rather than embracing emotions of self-pity or anger, he gets up and back into the race, where, in a outburst of joy manifesting in physical speed, he wins the race. Actor Ian Charleson brilliantly captured the joy with which Liddell ran. As he would say in perhaps the most famous line in the movie, and demonstrated in the clip below, “When I run I feel His pleasure”:
Working with all one’s heart means working enthusiastically with one’s emotions fully engaged in support of the task at hand. Granted, we cannot always command our emotions, but we can learn to cultivate them. And when our emotions do not obey us, by force of will we can forge ahead, knowing they will often soon follow. GS
