Earlier this month, I visited a high school writing class to make a fool of myself.
For real, I walk into the class ahead of the bell, stand by the whiteboard while the young, bright minds of tomorrow wander in, Bosco Sticks or some other hot lunch rubbish coming off their clothes like fumes off a chain-smoker. Everyone looks the way all high schoolers look—Breakfast Club high schoolers, not Saved by the Bell. After they’re all seated in a circle, I go to an empty desk and am introduced.
Do you want to know what the first thing a kid says to me is?
She says: “Oh, I thought you were a student…”
Nerve, this one. But I don’t let things like that get to me. Anyway, I decided the kid was a punk, because here I am with an absolutely sick Civil War-level beard (“sick” the way skateboarders mean it), and I may look young, but I don’t exactly look fifteen. I’m thinking twenty-two, at worst. High school kids!
So I was a little frazzled.
But, no worries, things got cool after that. After all, the class was an elective—these kids wanted to be here.
They asked me some questions about my job as a journalist. They thought because my title is Editor, it means I get to yell at people and have a lot of peons to make my paper for me. “No, no, no: that’s the Editor-in-Chief,” I said, and no one booed. They wanted to know how I got to be where I am. They seemed genuinely interested in what I liked to write. They wanted to pull up my blog on their phones. They asked me—the apparently fourteen-year-old-looking, gnarly-bearded, bottom-of-the-totem-pole, college-grad me—for advice on writing. I was really getting going now.
And then these punks-turned-America’s-greatest-hope threw this stumper my way:
“How does your faith affect your work?”
And I thought, hmm… … … with that many ellipses.

After a moment, I gave them what I think was a good, true answer. Work ethic. Standards. Not being ashamed to talk about my faith when it comes up. Imitating Christ in the way I interact with people. Defending virtue, people, freedom, speech. Go, First Amendment, go! Kicking exploitation, crookedness, lies, libel, intimidation, slander, greed, all that, in the beak. Basically, kids, saving the world from corrupt government, big business, and the gates of hell!Be a journalist!

Okay, I didn’t say those last parts.
But I was thinking about that question the whole train-ride home and have thought about it a few times since. I was told it’s a question that is asked of every guest speaker at a Christian school. I should have known. It’s a good question.
How does your faith affect your work? 

The question, maybe, is a bit weird. After all, why should we talk about faith like it is baggage weighing upon our every move, like it’s a condition influencing all decisions that could go one direction but, with faith in the picture, might now go another?

My faith is me. Or, it should be. It ought not be merely a part of me like some other things: my political positions, my sports loyalties, my ever-changing impression of high school kids. Faith should be more central to my identity than that—maybe even be my identity.

And if that’s the way faith should be, it’s not that I am “affected” by my faith to behave a certain way at work or think certain things on the train. Faith, maybe, must be more intrinsic. I am not “affected” by my faith any more than I’m “affected” by my mind or my body. In a big way, these things don’t “affect” me because they are me. This is not to say our minds and bodies and faith don’t define our limits, our possibilities, our beings, but they are so definitive as to be inseparable from who we are. We don’t say, “My mind influenced me to think that thought,” or “My body affected me take that action.” We could not think the things we think or do the things we do without our minds and bodies; how much less could we function without faith? Faith, perhaps, is our function, our reason, our vocation. (Calvin College, everybody!)
Thinking out loud here, folks, Ed Sheeran style. Thinking in ink too—dangerous!—and maybe tomorrow I will feel different, or maybe one of you will say something to make me think another way, but here’s where I am now.
We should all be able to answer the question: “How does your faith affect your work?” But maybe an even more appropriate question is, “How does your work inform your faith?”
Faith, I wonder, is not so much the bulb that lets me see; it is our very means of seeing. It is our eyes. And things like our jobs and relationships and ambitions inform our eyes by shaping where we glance, what we focus on, whether we’re squinting or gazing or looking daggers.
Faith is less a condition of the Christian life—maybe any life—and more the genome of it.
Perhaps next time a high schooler asks me, “Mr. Jackson, how does your faith affect your work?” I will give them a list of values and commands and sacred duties, or maybe I will say, quite simply, “Faith is going to work, faith is doing the work, and faith is finding the meaning in it.”

And, with any luck, some kid will respond: “Nice beard,” and accuse me of being a student once more, to which I will say, “Would that we all become like children again.”

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