A conversation with David.
Redeeming.work began as a conviction long before it was a website. A conversation with its founder about Genesis, the four relationships that order a life, and why balance was never the point.
I want to be upfront: none of this is original to me. This message has been well discussed by many voices long before mine. I am neither the beginning nor the end of this conversation. But I’ve spent decades living my way into it, and somewhere in my forties it finally moved from my head to my bones. I found freedom in it.
Here’s the heart of it: you were not created for dualism. You were not made to spend your life balancing work on one side of a scale and everything else on the other. That scale can’t be balanced. It never could. You were made for something older and simpler… six days of work and one day of rest, all of it lived as worship, all of it under a God who calls every square inch of your life His own.
And all of it starts in the same place the story does. Genesis.
Let me tell you how I got here.
Q — Let’s start where you start. Why Genesis?
Because Genesis is the blueprint. If you want to know what work is for, you have to go back to the only place we ever see work uncorrupted. Six days of work, one day of rest. That pattern isn’t a productivity hack God bolted on later, it’s the first thing we learn about him. He works. That’s how he introduces himself.
Q — What do you notice about how God works?
He’s orderly, and he’s ordering. Water before fish. Land before grass. He doesn’t put a creature somewhere its life can’t be sustained. He builds the conditions, then he fills them. That’s project sequencing. That’s operations. God is creating good things and putting them in motion, and then he keeps going, day by day, layer by layer, everything built on what came before.
So the first picture we have of work is organized and organizing. Not chaotic. Not frantic. Not a scramble. Ordered.
Q — Then on the sixth day, “let us make man in our image.” What’s in that “us”?
That’s the Trinity, Father, Son, Spirit, in perfect harmony and perfect unity. And I don’t think we can skip past that. The very moment work turns toward making us, it’s being done in relationship. Not in isolation. Not by a lone genius. In perfect relational unity.
That’s the original design. Work is relational at its root, because the Worker is relational at his root.
Q — You describe four relationships that come out of that. What are they?
Four, and the order matters.
First, in relationship to God, that’s salvation. Second, in relationship to myself and the knowledge, skills, and abilities I’ve been given, that’s sanctification. Third, in relationship to others, that’s service. Fourth, in relationship to creation, that’s stewardship.
We can never forget those four, and we can never rearrange them. Almost every distortion of work I’ve seen, burnout, ambition that eats people, ministry that runs on fumes, environmental carelessness, traces back to those four getting shuffled out of order.
Q — So where did the split come from?
Dualism. It existed before Plato, but Plato made it famous. The mind is eternal, the mind is of the spirit, and the body is physical and destined to burn up with everything else physical. Physical is lesser. Physical is suspect. Spiritual is better in the teaching of Plato...which was adopted by the early church father, Augustine and is echoed in the halls of the church today.
Give that a couple thousand years and you get a world where the job that emphasizes the spiritual is worth more than the job that builds "the world". In the worst perspective, if you’re clergy or a missionary, that’s the good job. Everything else is the job you do so you can fund the good jobs.
But the separation did not stop there. It crept into all areas of life. We split money into God’s money and my money. We split our behavior into an online self and an in-person self. We even split ourselves from nature, as if we were not part of the created world we are called to tend. If you want to see how that last one plays out, take a look at redeeming.earth.
Q — The sacred-secular divide.
That’s what we call it, and it’s a lie. God created us for good work. Not everyone was made to be an apostle or a missionary or a church worker. Other people are doing work that is just as good: physical work, ordinary work, work in creation. It’s good work. There’s no division. There never was one.
Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. This one has a lot of victims.
Q — And work–life balance is downstream of that?
It’s the same disease with a modern name. In Genesis, work was never separate from life. There’s no work–life balance in the garden, and there’s no work–life segregation either. It’s all integrated. Work is part of life. We are made for work.
It helps to remember the world Scripture was written into. It was agrarian. You worked the land, your life centered on family and that land, and if you weren’t working, you were resting. No side hustles. No extracurriculars. No compartments.
Life is a lot more layered now. You’ve got your primary job, your side hustle, family scattered across the country instead of living down the road. We compartmentalize everything, then we put ourselves in an unsustainable rhythm and go looking for balance to fix it. You will never have those things in balance. It was never designed to be balanced.
The biblical blueprint was integration, not balance. Six days of work, one day of rest.
Q — Then what’s rest for?
Enjoyment, and gratitude. God did not need rest, man does. So the Sabbath has multiple purposes. It’s enjoying the creation. It’s enjoying the work that’s been done. And it’s resting in God’s goodness and in the fact that we were given the ability to be part of creation at all.
“The Sabbath is a big thank you to God.”
And rest doesn’t mean you stop parenting or stop doing what it takes to do life. Those are still work, just not work for the sake of production and money. Rest is recovering for the week ahead. Most of all it’s reflection, recognizing that God is sovereign and that every skill you have is a gift He gave you to steward.
Even the six days of work are meant to be worship. Thank you, God, for the ability to do this. Thank you for the gifts I get to use well on behalf of Your kingdom and the common good. As Lester DeKoster put it, “Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others.” Or as Luther is often paraphrased, God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.
Q — So what actually counts as work?
Everything that isn’t rest. Everything that isn’t leisure or Sabbath.
It’s the paid work, sure. It’s also maintaining a home. Being present in a marriage. Raising children, yes, changing diapers counts. Serving your parents as they age. Helping a neighbor. Volunteering at church, in your community, on the PTA. All of that is work, it’s just not paid work, and we have let the paycheck become the thing that decides whether something counts.
Q — Genesis 1 and 2 are the blueprint. But we don’t live there.
No, we don’t. Genesis 3 happened. The fall of man entered the workplace, and nothing is as it should be or as it will one day be.
That’s where bad bosses come from. Bad workplaces. Bad practices. Greed. Me and mine. It’s where you get the boss who expects an employee to give everything, and the employee who never learned how to say no.
We can’t make sense of work apart from God. And we can’t make sense of it while pretending man isn’t sinful, either.
Q — You draw a line between optimizing and maximizing.
A sharp one. It’s one thing to be efficient and to optimize. It’s another thing to maximize, to squeeze until there’s nothing left to come out. When you maximize any resource, you run it into the ground. That’s extraction, and we’ve built an extractive posture toward work, toward land, toward people.
It might be semantics, but I believe this is where we get tripped up in our paid work. We often give it all, at the expense of other relationships, or we demand it from others. We should work hard and optimize resources but we should not maximize and deplete a resource. That resource is good for little else after that. Imagine the working parent who arrives home depleted...that's not healthy for anyone.
Q — Where’s the hope in that?
We can’t usher in heaven ourselves. Let’s be clear about that. But we can make things better, and we were told to.
God set us in motion in Genesis 1 to improve things, to make them work together. He put all the elements in place and said there was no man to work the ground, and then he put us there to continue the process. The work from Genesis 3 to today looks different from the work of Genesis 1 and 2, but the assignment hasn’t changed: use the gifts, skills, and abilities we’ve been given. Steward them well. Connect things. Improve things. Put them in motion.
The difference now is that there are broken things. There weren’t any in Genesis 1 and 2. Now there are, and we have a role in fixing them.
Q — Where did this begin for you?
In college, I had a professor named Dr. David Naugle who introduced us to Abraham Kuyper and the idea that our faith was meant to engage every sphere of life, every place we work and live. Kuyper said it like this:
“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!”
ABRAHAM KUYPER
That lodged in me. I heard it again years later at Acton University, and slowly it began to solidify into a real understanding of what our work, and our role in it as believers, is actually about.
The seed of all this was planted late in college. But I’ll be honest. I didn’t really grasp it until my mid-forties.
Q — How do you actually live integration on a chaotic day?
It starts with perspective. If we know what’s most important, the day will define itself around that. If we don’t, the day defines itself for us. The tyranny of the urgent takes over, and the most important things get crowded out.
So plan. If calling a relative matters today, put it on the calendar, otherwise it evaporates. Make room for the big things on purpose.
And then, get better at saying no. We tend to say yes to everything out of a kind of fear of missing out, and we end up full of good things but empty of the great ones. You can’t have it all. But you can have what’s most important to you, if you’re willing to decline the rest.
Q — And the name, “redeeming work,’ carries more than one meaning.
Three, actually. There’s the redeeming work of Christ, the work on which everything else depends. There’s redeemed work, the labor you and I offer back to God, done with skill and integrity before His face. And there’s the redemption of work itself, the effort to actually make work better than we found it.
That third one is a gift and a privilege. Supervisors get to make work better. Managers and leaders get to make work better. Coworkers get to make work better for the people right next to them.
Most projects pick one of those lanes. I don’t think you can. They hold each other up.
Q — How do you know where to start?
Four questions. Walk into any environment, especially your workplace, and ask: What is good here that I can preserve, protect, and promote? What is evil here that I can oppose and resist? What is missing here that I can innovate and contribute? What is broken here that the Lord might use me to restore?
I want to be clear about where those come from, because I didn’t invent them. I first heard a version from someone at the Colson Center. Chuck Colson asked questions in this spirit, and John Stonestreet adapted them.
“Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.”
JOHN STONESTREET
That’s exactly why I want to help retire the idea of work–life balance. It’s a bad idea, and it has victims, the people worn out trying to keep a scale level that was never going to balance.
I don’t run through the four word-for-word every day anymore, but I live in their spirit constantly. Where I see something good, how do I protect it and keep it going? Where I see an injustice, how do we correct it? Where a system is broken, how do we improve it? Where there’s chaos, how do we bring order, whether that’s an accountant’s filing system, the papers on my own desk, or a breakdown in communication?
And communication is the big one. It is every organization’s primary problem. From where I sit, confusion is the enemy’s favorite tool, especially when people are trying to do good. So often we end up fighting each other when we actually share the same problem and have just misunderstood one another. In the church it’s the same trick: get people arguing over the music style or the carpet color, and no one’s focused on the mission. Point the frustration at the real problem, not at each other.
Underneath all of it is a refusal to settle for the status quo. Celebrate good. Resist evil. Create what’s missing. Restore what’s broken. If something is broken, let’s fix it. If there’s chaos, let’s bring order. If there’s injustice, let’s fight for justice. That’s our role, and we all have one.
Q — What would you say to someone whose work feels meaningless, or whose workplace is genuinely toxic?
Those are two different answers. If your work feels meaningless, I’d start with design: there is no ordinary work in God’s economy. Luther said God doesn’t need your good work, but your neighbor does. Your spreadsheet, your classroom, your job site is a place where somebody’s flourishing is at stake.
If your workplace is toxic, that’s not design. That’s distortion, and Scripture is unsparing about it. Naming greed, exploitation, and contempt for people is part of redeeming work, not a departure from it. Sometimes faithfulness means staying and pushing back. Sometimes stewardship means leaving. Both can be obedience.
Q — When someone reads this and closes their laptop, what do you hope shifts?
Just this. Stop running the race of trying to keep it all afloat.
Determine the order of your loves, and then make the decisions that support that order. That’s the whole thing.
And a small hint to get you started, it should begin with God.