What do you do when life becomes mundane?

When I was a little girl, I used to love to play “secretary” or “office” with my sister, using all of our mom’s desk “toys.” You know, the fun stuff… staplers, Scotch tape, Post-It notes, and my favorite, LABELS.

Labels of any and all varieties were so much fun to me. Seeing my daughter now and her love for stickers, I guess my fascination with labels was because they were “grown-up” stickers. File labels, address labels, shipping labels, those little, colorful, circular dots my mom used for pricing garage sale items… They were all so much fun.

While I loved playing secretary, it was never my lifelong dream to become a secretary. However, I learned some typing and computer skills to prepare me for my transition into the real world, and it’s a good thing I did. After graduating college, I spent the next 8 years doing secretarial-based work. 8 years.

Guess what? Over time as a secretary, labels that once were the uncommon, fun thing to play with became somewhat of a nuisance. (Don’t get me wrong; there’s still this little dork inside me who loves playing with labels to this very day). But something that had been an uncommon treat, a toy to play with in my childhood, turned into a very common, daily obligation – part of my job.

It may seem like a silly example, but you know, a lot of things in life start out as “fun” and uncommon but quickly turn routine, mundane, and common. It happens at work. It happens at school. It happens with our relationships with people, even our spouses. It happens with our relationship with God.

Maybe in a future post we can explore what to do when relationships become common, but for now, let’s just explore the “doing” aspect… work, school, etc.

What do you do when exciting turns to blah? In my experience, there’s one answer that is usually the right answer in these scenarios… You do it anyway.

You know that verse that makes us all cringe when someone throws it out to us?

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters…” (Colossians 3:23 NIV)

We often forget the next verse, though…

“since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

No one hates the mundane more than I do. I am very much a “projects-oriented” kind of person. I love starting a new project, meeting a deadline, creating a new design, meeting another deadline. I can do that all day. It’s those non-deadline, ordinary, boring things that irk me… For a secretary, it can be running another label for another envelope. Feeding another sheet of letterhead through the printer. Answering another email that asked the same question as the last email. Answering another boring phone call. Yours may be different, but you know what I’m talking about… those things that seem to lose their meaning and significance the more you do them.

Sometimes there’s purpose in the mundane, and sometimes there may not be. A lot of jobs seem to involve meaningless “busy work,” and a lot of employees gripe about it. But our instruction is not to justify the work. Our instruction is to work at it with all our heart, as if we’re reporting directly to the Lord. Because we are.

Ouch, right? I think I stepped on my own toes there.

If it helps, remember why you’re doing the busy work in the first place. Besides doing it for the Lord, which is first and foremost, you’re probably getting a paycheck for it, so maybe the sheer purpose of the common things is to put food on your table. If that’s the case, you can be thankful that someone is willing to pay you to do something that you don’t feel even needs to be done, and it’s a miraculous source of provision for you.

If you’re a student, then the purpose in the common for you is obviously the diploma or degree that you are working toward, as well as the advantage to your future that you expect it to provide.

Maybe you’re a stay-at-home mom (or dad) who does the busy work of laundry, dishes, bathe the kids, chauffeur the kids, cook dinner, more laundry, more dishes… Even if your mundane work doesn’t bring home a paycheck, the sense of order and sheer value you are adding to your household is immeasurable.

If you absolutely cannot find any beneficial purpose to what you are doing, then my first question to you is, “Why are you still doing it?” and second, “What should you be doing?”

But chances are, there is purpose in the common, ordinary things you’re doing. And chances are just as great that God provided that opportunity for you to do those things. So while the common may be unappealing, boring, and seem to go unrewarded at times, maybe it would do us good to remember verse 24…

“…you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

If I can receive an inheritance from the God of all the universe just by doing the common things with an uncommon attitude, it’s totally worth it to me.