Day Four: My Job Smells

I am very fortunate to love my job. I know that lots of people have to get up and go to work at a place where they don't love their jobs; so I feel especially blessed to say that I wake up ALMOST every morning, looking forward to going to work. Perhaps what makes the experience so great is the team of people I get to do life with 5 or 6 days a week.

I don't work a single day that I don't laugh, that I don't feel challenged to be better, that I don't have to think about decisions I make, and that I don't get to impact someone's life. It might be easy to chalk all of that up to working in a chuch, but trust me, I've worked in some churches and the only thing I looked forward to was going home each day. Something is different about this team of people.

Before I go on, I want to issue a disclaimer to people that I have worked with in the past that I love, that I have formed cherished friendships with, that I loved working alongside, and say to you that though the circumstances under which we worked together might have been different, I love you the same.

As I was thinking yesterday about what makes this team so different, I realized that it's our leader. He runs zealously after God in a way I have never seen anyone run after God. You can tell it's true because he smells like God. He is gentle, and humble, and a warrior for God's people. He calls us to pray over our decisions, over our days, over our families, over our ministries, over opportunities lost. He calls us to confess, and to rejoice, and to beg, and to expect great things, and he asks us often to do those things publically.



Our weekly "Staff Meeting" is one hour of prayer and worship together. Once every three months, we all go off together and spend an entire day in prayer. That might sound like a long day to you, it sounded long to me too in the beginning, but it flies by. We are challenged to take our own personal prayer retreats regularly.

We are a family. We fight. We get upset with each other. We call each other names (usually to our faces). But we also defend one another. We give one another the benefit of the doubt. And we pray for one another.

All that to say, my job smells like God. And I like that.