Note: From When Work Hurts (IVP, 2025). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Once upon a time, I felt excited about work. I had a vague sense of calling – that God was inviting me to help people develop deeper relationships with him. That calling gave me enough direction to go to seminary. When I graduated with my Master of Divinity degree, I felt this Holy Spirit current charging in my veins and a deep assurance that my friends and I had been well-equipped to steward the gospel no matter where God sent us. That passion stayed alive through two years of a pastoral residency. And then the residency ended. In the middle of the Great Recession.
At that time, churches were laying off more pastors than they were hiring. My husband had also been a pastoral resident. We thought the odds of finding one ministry position were better than the odds of finding two. For a few months, I worked retail while my husband temped and looked for a new job. When my boss asked for my availability, I told her I could work anytime other than Sunday mornings. But she would never schedule me for more than twenty-nine hours per week. I wasn’t looking for the benefits that came with being full-time. I simply wanted to work as much as I could to earn money. I scrambled for other gigs to try to supplement our income.
When my husband got a new job, we moved. And no one in the new town would hire me – at least, no one in the types of jobs I was seeking, ones that used my gifts and my training. I sent out résumé after résumé. I even went to a temp agency. I got a little worried when the staffing associate, Rose, asked me if I considered myself to be a professional. I was the only prospective employee in business dress. She found me a job making cold calls for a local veteran’s affairs organization. I lasted two days.
Work Has Hurt Many of Us
What I wish I had known then was that I wasn’t alone.
I lost my job as the United States began climbing out of the Great Recession. That was a time of severe global economic decline from 2007 to 2009 that stemmed largely from two related crises: the burst of the housing bubble and the financial meltdown of big banks. Millions of people around the world lost their jobs. The unemployment rate in the United States rose sharply, from 5 to 10 percent, indicating that millions of people were looking for work and not able to find it (Evan Cunningham, “Great Recession, Great Recovery? Trends from the Current Population Survey,” Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).
That wouldn’t be the last time a massive employment crisis would sweep the globe. When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, roughly 250 million full-time jobs were lost around the world – four times the amount of jobs lost during the Great Recession (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021, Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth”). In the United States, over 20 million people lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic (Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, “Tracking COVID-19 Unemployment and Job Losses”).
As people returned to work and the economy tried to rebound, a new phenomenon emerged – the Great Resignation. Between June 2021 and December 2022, over 4 million people per month quit their jobs. Prior to the pandemic, an average of 1.8 million people per month were laid off or terminated from their jobs, and since the pandemic, the number has gone down slightly to about 1.5 million people per month (see the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey). Still, that’s a lot of job loss.
Those statistics are jaw-dropping, yet they don’t even begin to account for all of the other disappointment and disillusionment that happen at work – the frustration and sometimes outright abuse we endure: not getting the interview, job or promotion we wanted; being the victim of bullying, discrimination or harassment; holding out for even a standard-of-living raise; wishing our boss wasn’t such a tyrant; or wanting our coworkers to treat us with dignity. The list could go on and on. And it does.
The Gap Between God’s Design for Work and What We Experience
This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Work isn’t supposed to be fraught with so much disappointment and despair. God designed work to be a delight. In fact, God works. In six days, God formed and filled our world, creating us, his image bearers on the last day (Genesis 1). And God continues to work, caring for all that he has made.
God saw the completed creation and called it very good (Genesis 1:31). He delighted in the work of his hands. And I believe that’s what he intended for us to experience in our work. But sin destroyed that hope. After Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit, God punished them and cursed the ground – both of which had dire consequences for our work.
When we read the phrases “painful labor” and “painful toil” in Genesis 3:16‑17, we likely think about physical pain. Painful labor. Yes, it is, with and without an epidural. Painful toil. Obviously. Splinters and sore muscles seem like the logical outcome of working the ground. But the Hebrew word translated as “painful” can also mean causing “mental and emotional suffering” (C. Meyer, “ עצַָב ,” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978], 3:278‑80). This word shows up in one other place in scripture. In Genesis 5:29 we read of Noah’s birth: “He [Lamech] named him Noah and said, ‘He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.’” For generations after the fall, people experienced such anguish in their work that they needed comfort and relief. Many of us have the same need today. Work can certainly break our bodies. But more often it breaks our hearts.
Dealing With Our Work Hurt
When work beats us up, burns us out or breaks our hearts, giving up and staying down on the floor can seem like viable options. We could wallow in our sadness. We could ignore our pain or try to numb it as we try to move on to the next project or next job. But here’s the problem with both those options: they make our light grow dim. Brené Brown warns about the consequences of numbing our pain: “We cannot selectively numb emotion,” she writes. “If we numb the dark, we numb the light. If we take the edge off pain and discomfort, we are, by default, taking the edge off joy, love, belonging and the other emotions that give meaning to our lives” (Brené Brown, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts, 85).
We have to tend to our pain. If we don’t deal with our work hurt, eventually it will deal with us.
When work hurts us – physically or emotionally – it’s as if a violent wind rattles our flame and threatens to snuff us out. When reduced to a flicker, we no longer burn brightly. Jesus calls us to be beacons of hope. I imagine his followers as millions of tiny lighthouses illuminating the way to him in the midst of life’s challenges. If we don’t attend to the pain that work causes, we’ll fade into the shadows, turn inward and wonder what we could have done to keep the light on.
It’s hard to be a city on a hill when we’re a smoldering pile of rubble. As we heal from our work-related hurt and develop resilience to deal with it again and again, we can better respond to the call that God has for us to be rebuilders, renewers, repairers and restorers as we partner in his redemptive work in the world.
Adapted from When Work Hurts by Meryl Herr. ©2025 Meryl Herr. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Meryl Herr, founder, GoodWorks Group
