“No individual, by the very state of existence, can avoid life as a form of servitude; it only remains for us to decide, deny, or remain oblivious to, whom or what we serve.” ----Carolyn Weber

What do you do with the drudgery of adulthood? That moment on a Monday at 4pm and you realize that you will likely have to work Saturday in order to accomplish everything that needs to be done. It is a motivation killer, but it is a part of life that you must learn to cope with.

David Foster Wallace accurately describes the mundane part of adulthood in his Kenyon College commencement speech titled “This is Water.” In his speech Wallace addresses college graduates who have spent 4 years studying for their careers but have never had to force themselves to go to the grocery store to pick up supplies for dinner right after a rough day at work. He calls it the part of adulthood “nobody talks about in commencement speeches.” He sets the scene for the problem here:

“It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.”

Wallace’s audience is full young college graduates who have never had to face the bleaker side of survival in the real world. But at some point, every American has to face this in their twenties. It is the physical and mental stress of running small errands that wear down on your patience all of the sake of eating a normal weeknight meal. Wallace presents this as a part of adulthood that must be faced; yet he presents it in a “get ready for this” manner because if you aren’t careful you can become a rude and grumpy person in response to everyday realities such as this.

Why do might some of us respond to such situations in rude and grumpy ways? Wallace argues that our default setting in situations like this are not to be kind and thoughtful, but bring to the surface the problem of self-centeredness:

“Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.”

Wallace’s tone in this sounds more like a confession of the fact he resents people in situations like this. You can sense the shame he feels that he often sees other people as blocking his happiness. He goes on to say that this default mindset is when “I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.”

But ultimately, we all have a choice when we face the drudgery and boring parts of adult life. We also have a choice in terms of facing our own self-centered tendencies when they bubble up. I want to talk about these two problems because I face them on a weekly basis. His emphasis in his speech is stressing that in the face of such problems in adult life we have a choice to make. However, I want to go into more detail about what kind of choice must be made in order to endure situations in which we feel meaninglessness and frustrated.

Pondering My Identity in Christ as a Servant

You may be familiar with the phrase “identity in Christ.” Part of the Christian’s identity in Christ is a response to “Who am I?” The Christian is forgiven. The Christian is a son or daughter of God. The Christian is a part of the family of God. The Christian will dwell in heaven one day because of Christ’s death on the cross. Understanding your identity in Christ can bring a significant amount of peace into your life. My own life narrative is closely connected to understanding my multi-faceted identity as being in Christ.

But what about the workplace and adulthood? Does identity in Christ relate to the workplace? Does my identity in Christ help me deal with the harshness of adult life? These questions hit me at the age of 26, as I worked retail and felt the “daily tedium and meaninglessness” similar to the woman at the register that Wallace describes above in his speech. Back in 2011 I worked at Home Depot while I was in grad school and my job seemed disconnected to my faith.

I did not see much meaning or fulfillment in working in retail. I had spent my entire college experience planning on either becoming a pastor or a writer. But both of those paths had failed to materialize. In the meantime, I was working at Home Depot talking to customers about the excellent quality of Weber Grills and helping them find ant killer products. All of my 22 year old dreams of changing the world for Christ were fading fast. Instead I had to pay the bills to get through grad school so I could do Plan C to become a community college English professor.

One particular night stands out to me in all of this. I worked in the garden department from 1pm to 10pm in my orange Home Depot apron with “Nate” written on the front in black Sharpie ink. Around 6pm the store would often clear out and my responsibility would be to walk around my department with an electronic scanner gun and do “packdown” for 4 hours straight. I did most of this alone. This meant that I would make sure all the products on the shelves were fully stocked considering the surplus stock was stored over each product and it was my job to make sure there were no products missing. On this night I walked through the aisles of outside garden department, as the sun was setting and a Sarah McLachlan song played over the over-head speakers. As I stood there handling products to be sold, the power of the Sarah McLachlan song felt authentic and meaningful. This song made me feel conflicted and confused as to why I was working retail in my mid-twenties. I had this deep longing for something meaningful to happen, yet there I was being a peasant for a gigantic national corporation. I asked God “Where are You in all this? Why am I here?”

Yes, you read that correctly. The Sarah McLachlan song “Sweet Surrender” made me ask God questions about the existential direction of my life. That's the mood-influencing power of 90's muzak.

And it was during this time that I read Philippians 2 where Paul describes the experience of shaping your mind to be like Christ’s:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

It wasn’t until I read this passage did I find a theological framework to place my boring retail experience in for the first time. It was at this point when I saw Jesus as a servant and therefore started to see my own life’s purpose to become a servant.

There is a heavy emphasis in this passage for how Jesus viewed other people. Paul writes: “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

Jesus made himself nothing to serve other people. Jesus could have opted out of being a servant. Since he was God he could have said “Na, I’m good. I don’t think I have time to be a human. I’m God, I’ll just talk to them.” Jesus could have come down just to give some sermons to all the desperate peasants and then teleported back to heaven.

But that’s not the full story of what happened. Jesus did ascend to heaven and he was a teacher. But by being born human he not only associates himself with mere mortals, he also decided to serve them despite his status as God. He identified as a servant. So he went lower than just being a teacher and a peer------and telling us what to do. He saw himself as a servant to other human beings. Paul describes him in verse 7 as “making himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.”

After reading this verse, it changed the way I saw my job at Home Depot. Up until that point I had only seen Jesus as a teacher and a Savior for my sins. But I had never thought of him as a servant. Nor had I ever thought of myself as someone who needed to see himself as a servant. I saw Jesus as just a “knowledge worker,” someone with a message (which is totally is) but I had for some reason looked over the passages in the Bible (there are a lot) about Christ as a servant of other men.

So this changed my attitude as I approached customers on a regular basis. I began reciting this passage in my mind as I worked and the idea of a Christian as a servant began to sink into my mind. Interacting with people on a Saturday for 8 hours a day, loading trucks, talking about lawnmowers, asking my co-workers for help. And also dealing with angry customers. I remember reciting Philippians 2 to myself in my head as a woman yelled at me over the phone about the fact that I put her on hold for about 3 minutes. If Jesus died on the cross for the sin of man, I could endure one person losing their mind for being put on hold. Viewing myself as a servant of God gives me a framework for what it means to do menial tasks for other people. It is easier to love other people at work (co-workers, customers) when you see yourself as a servant to others. If we identified with Christ’s attitude of being a servant then how might that help us approach our role in the kingdom of God at the daily 9-5?

I’m not the kind of person who flippantly says “God taught me _________ through this experience.” However, I believe that God had me work at Home Depot during my mid-20’s so that I would become open minded to the idea of being a servant like Jesus. Isn’t it funny that I grasped this theological concept by helping people load bricks onto their trucks? Before this job the idea of "Christ as servant" was just a theory." Yet ever since my job at Home Depot my work-life has taken on twice as much meaning because I see myself as a servant.

I can't express how much this passage has got me through the bleak parts of adulthood. It has infused my everyday interactions with customers with meaning and purpose. Author Oswald Chambers explains this clearly in terms of how God might use us even when we feel out of place or bored at our jobs:

“We do not need the grace of God to withstand crises— human nature and pride are sufficient for us to face the stress and strain magnificently. But it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of every day as a saint, going through drudgery, and living an ordinary, unnoticed, and ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God— but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life, and holy on the ordinary streets, among ordinary people— and this is not learned in five minutes.”