What Can a Family of French Farmers Teach Us About Living Our Faith at Work?

Quite a bit, it turns out.

How can we live our faith at work?

If there’s one question almost all Christians ask themselves at some point it’s this. When we’re sitting at our my desks, answering emails, meeting with clients, teaching our students, just doing our jobs, what does it mean to do these things as Christians?

The usual answers are well trodden.

To be a Christian at work you must have the best work ethic, be kind and honest. You must also be unafraid to share the gospel with your coworkers while having the best work ethic.

There’s another response, however, that I find to be much less simple but so much more beautiful. This way of thinking is best illustrated by a memory from the past of Thomas Merton.

The God-infused life

In his classic autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton reflects on his time as a child living with a devout Catholic family in the rural farmland of France.

Remembering this family, he writes,

I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity….[they] received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity. Their farm, their family, and their Church were all that occupied these good souls, and their lives were full.”

Merton’s recollection paints a beautiful picture of what it means to live and work as a Christian.

Far more than doing things a certain way, working as Christians is more about encountering God in such deep, regular, and meaningful ways that whatever we do is infused by the grace of God.

This family was occupied with the simple, mundane tasks of everyday life. But they lived and worked in such a way that they weren’t simply just another family working their farm and raising their family. From the “habitual union of their souls with God,” everything they did was miraculously, mysteriously, touched by the grace of God.

And while he wouldn’t come to faith until much later, this family planted seeds in Merton’s soul that would one day bear great fruit.

The lesson from this is simple

Living and working as a Christian is much less about what we do and much more about being so tethered to Christ that anything we do is touched by the grace of God.

The daily work of answering emails, chatting with clients and studying for finals is the arena in which the Holy Spirit works to mold God’s new creation.

As Christians we simply anchor our souls so deep into the heart of God that we can’t help but be the kind of people who channel Christ’s redemption in everything that we do.