Recently Read: "Every Good Endeavour" by Timothy Keller

“I don’t want to make work my life”. These were the very words I said to my friends during my university days. As an intern, these utterances were easy. Simply show up on time, do what your manager tells you to do, leave them all behind you as you walk out at 6pm. Rinse and repeat. Nights would be spent studying for my school, partaking in my own hobbies, spending time with my friends in school. My identity was a student; all I needed to do was to enjoy school life, achieve good grades and get a good job.

In 2024, I started working full-time. De-coupling work and my life wasn’t so easy anymore. “What do you do?”, “How’s your work?”, “Do you have good work life balance?” — these were almost always the first few questions asked at every meet up with friends. All of a sudden, my identity was bound to my job title and company, my happiness at work, my ability to produce business value. To be fair, I never hated my work; in fact, I enjoyed the challenges and growth it brought about. However, it’s not uncommon to feel that I’m but the sum of lines of code delivered or tickets closed. This brought about a fair amount of discouragement. In light of this, I was recommended to pick up this book to better understand the idea of work, its place in this world and in my life as a christian.

Keller divides the book into 3 sections: “God’s Plan for Work”, “Our Problems with Work” and “The Gospel and Work”. In the first few chapters, he quickly lays out truths from the bible: work was and is always part of God’s plan; work is not a curse nor to be avoided. God worked to create the world. God commands man to take care of His creations. He also provides every person with unique dispositions to carry out the work. These truths provides a source of dignity for all kinds of work — the janitor who ensures the cleanliness of the toilets and the CEO of a company who makes good executive decisions are viewed the same in God’s eyes. This is encouraging, because it provides the case for being identified by my work. My title of ‘cloud infrastructure engineer’ may not define me, but my valuable work of ‘maintaining and designing secure cloud environments for the government to build meaningful applications for the people’ can. My work lays the foundations for others to work upon and enrich the lives of the people. This is something I have always been willing to identify with, to be proud of.

Sin, however, has thwarted this perfect design of work. We look down on others for doing ‘lesser work’; if you happen to be a ‘lesser worker’, then hustle hard to find a better job. Yet, we never find satisfaction in our toils — there is always something that could have been done better, or a new target just on the horizon waiting for us to achieve. The money or compensation is never enough. The list of thorns goes on. The commonplace advice is to then prioritise self — happiness, mental health — over work. While well-intentioned, it proliferates the idea that honest hard work will never meet your expectations for joy and satisfaction in life. This false dichotomy has thus bred the misinterpreted idea that work should not be your identity. Do the bare minimum at work, get a proper life outside.

To this, Keller challenges and provides a clear exposition on what God has demanded our work to be about.

“And if you get the story of the world wrong — if, for example, you see life here as mainly about self-actualization and self-fulfilment rather than the love of God — you will get your life responses wrong, including the way you go about your work.”

Today, I am much better at telling myself that my joy and satisfaction comes not from business metrics. I work hard and well because my work is a service to others. My compensation is a gift, not merited. Business metrics has its place in highlighting my talents, helping me set new goals to achieve and challenging me to improve my flaws. And yet all of my work, I do it for God.

There is much more covered in Keller’s succinct book. Apart from the bible, it builds upon plenty of brilliant works from other renowned christians. It is invaluable in providing a timeless compass for all who wish to understand work.