“Are we kidding ourselves?”
This has been a common refrain among many these past few months while reengaging work and school and other aspects of life in light of the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
For many, work has evaporated, with more than 44 million claims for unemployment being registered in the past 12 weeks.
For others, work has shifted abruptly to the home, while others’ work has shifted into overdrive as newfound essential service.
At home work and duties that felt ho-hum a few weeks prior now feel like drudgery. Despite our best efforts, our pace has been stilled in a world still trying desperately to cope by pretending all is well.
Many of us are facing, in ways big and small, a new reality: what do we do when our work and our life feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? What happens when we lose our sense of purpose?
It’s true we are in unprecedented territory, which calls for a new playbook, but it’s also true that our need for work and community remains unchanged even in spite of the shifting tiles of life in the pandemic. It can be exhausting to hold both truths together.
Are we clinging to perfunctory rhythms as a way to ignore the sinking ship in our midst? Or are we rediscovering afresh our own need for good work to lay our hands to, regardless of the circumstances of life?
C.S. Lewis offered a word years prior that resonates and can apply to us in this tension today.
C.S. Lewis on ‘Learning in Wartime’
Recently I reread C.S. Lewis’ masterful sermon “Learning in Wartime,” which was delivered to students at Oxford University on Oct. 22, 1939.
It was only 51 days prior World War II had begun, and many of the students Lewis spoke to surely were rattled.
How could one learn at a time when so much is happening? So much has changed? So many are dying? It’s a word that’s applicable for us in the midst of our own disruption as well.
Lewis’ sermon didn’t shy from these questions, but it didn’t bother getting hung up on them either. Instead, he outlined three enemies along with a few key correctors students could follow, especially those whose hope and trust was placed in Christ alone. It’s a word that carries weight for us in our work as well these days.
"Do not let your nerves and emotions lead you into thinking your predicament more abnormal than it really is," Lewis wrote, offering a calm word for anxious souls.
Lewis’ Three Enemies
There were three enemies being illuminated through the wartime. The first is excitement, which Lewis describes as “the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work.” For each of us, whether realized or not, our mind faces the temptation of wandering all the more in the age of minute-by-minute developments in the pandemic.
Lewis is ultimately pointing at something very human in each of us: our proclivity to distraction. For us now, naming this tendency to lose focus from the newness brought by the virus was a word of insight then and holds true for us now especially in an age of around-the-clock media coverage and constant contact with the screen at our side.
The second enemy is frustration, which stems from the sluggish pace with which we now approach our work. Our window of tolerance, whether we realized it or not, has shrunk and become more rigid, and our normal means and outputs don’t apply as they did before.
"Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future,” Lewis said. “Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for."
For us today, this can look like being drawn back to a slower, more intentional pace of life. What if the limits we’re experiencing are not holding us back but instead correcting our own proclivity to drown ourselves in busyness and productivity? Psalm 119:105 says that God’s word is a lamp unto our feet. A lamp, inherently, is limited in its amplification; it can only provide enough light for the next step.
It’s this daily dependence Lewis implored those students to take refuge in. How much so can we use these words today? Because the Gospel is true, there’s great hope the Christian takes in realizing the burden to plan and perform is not meant for us. We rest in God’s fatherly care, especially when our ground below feels unsteady and our doubts begin to rise.
The third enemy is fear, which comes as wartime brings to the forefront the reminder of man’s fragility.
“The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them,” Lewis said. "War makes death real to us.” This fear of death that wartime brings to our forefront was only illuminating something that is true for each of us. We will all one day perish. But rather than living either carefree or overprotective lives, Lewis called for a more sober-minded approach to remembering your own death, resting in your savior, and faithfully using the day you’ve been given to his glory.
‘We Can Think So Still’
Before concluding, Lewis pivots.
After identifying these enemies, he speaks firmly and directly against the ways mankind seeks to build our own heaven on earth, noting that “if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned."
Lewis saw this wartime moment as a season to reframe our view on our life and work. If we were climbing the ladder of self-fulfillment, this disruption of normalcy offers a time to pause, repent, and reframe whose kingdom we are building.
But for those who were already faithfully co-laboring alongside the Lord in building his kingdom, they could take great heart in continuing to serve at the station God had placed us.
For those, he offered a final charge: to press on and continue in a life of work (learning, in his students’ case) “humbly offered to God” even amid the turmoil.
So rather than being swept up by excitement, frustration, or fear in the midst of approaching our work amid the pandemic, let’s heed Lewis’ wisdom and take a collective exhale and breathe in God’s mercy afresh.
For in doing so it grants us room to fix our eyes on our Lord Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, resting in the sure refuge of His faithfulness as we seek to do our work faithfully.
Gage Arnold is the communications director for the Center for Faith & Work Los Angeles and an MDiv student at Covenant Theological Seminary. He holds a BS in journalism and electronic media from the University of Tennessee.