The Job from Hell: On the Job Survival Aids for Christians

By Marie Hebert

The American workplace often provides no evidence of either a good God or any good in Man. The daily grind of our jobs and the caustic people we encounter there can be so disconnected from our Christian fellowship experience in church and so far removed from our Christian principles that we can easily grow cynical. The mounting evidence that God is disconnected and far removed from the reality of our workplace can cause all of us at times to question if it is possible to earn a living and do it as a Christian. Is this really how God intends for us to live? The Job from Hell addresses this real-life struggle of working-class Christians. For those who work in abusive environments where they are isolated from Christian fellowship and support, Marie Hebert shares her personal experiences of God's consolation, explanation, and revelation that supported her in her own daily journey in the workplace. In The Job from Hell, she offers a spiritual explanation as to why you may be locked in your current job as well as offering a daily, steady structure of support on which you can lean for the time that you are employed there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098003807

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The Job from Hell

On_the_Job Survival Aids for Christians

Marie Hebert

Copyright © 2019 by Marie Hebert

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Nature of Occupation

Spiritual Warfare

You Are That Important

3 Things We Know about God

The God-Awful Truth

The Breaking Point

Redefining Suffering

Homework

Dazzling White

SIMILES & METAPHORS

Water Faucet

Duck in a Pond

The Diamond Process

Coins

Undertow

Roaches in the Kitchen

The Curtain

Air Bubbles

Veering Off the Road

Super Bowl

Mountain Climbing

Pretty Candle

Playing Chess

Command Ops

Olympian

Waves Crashing Against the Rocks

Ye Ole Fishing Hole

Turning Over the Car Keys

On Sale Now!

Heroes and Adventurers

Pinball

Committed

Beavers

Merry-Go-Round

Crack in the Windshield

GPS

Red Beans & Rice

Rebound

Collecting Seashells

Command Center

Shadows

Beggars on the Side of the Road

Losing Weight

Polishing the Silver

Leaf in a Stream

Best-Selling Novel

Introduction

This is Sunday morning. This is my day to relax and mentally separate myself as far as possible from my grueling job. I feel so relieved on the days that I do not have to go into work. My original plans for today were simply to treat myself like a human being, to slow down my life and to clear my head. As a reward for surviving another work week, I treated myself this morning to the big homemade breakfast buffet in town.

I drink my coffee black. The coffee refills on the buffet are both endless and notoriously too hot to drink when first poured. Waiting for the coffee to cool allows me time to unload all the pressures, frustrations, and concerns of my work week. Staring comatose into the coffee mug is mentally like dumping toxic waste into a bottomless black pool. I don’t know where the toxic waste goes, nor do I care. I just need to dump it somewhere. If I don’t routinely empty my head of it, it builds up such a lethal concentration that it almost kills me.

I was thinking to myself how people have no idea how much stress I work under every day at my job. My self-centered thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the raspy, unnecessarily-loud, over-the-top greeting of my waitress. She rattled off the scripted checklist that all waitresses memorize: she wished me good morning, she told me her name, and she assured me that she would be taking care of me. If I needed anything,…blah, blah, blah…

Not once did she make eye contact with me. She was too overwhelmed with stacking and balancing her tray with the dirty dishes from someone else’s table. Not once did her inflection or pitch change. Her job was to recite the script, not mean it. She never even paused to let me get in a word. Time to actually care about her customers was not a luxury she was allowed. She was in up-and-running mode. She was denied the time, forbidden the interest, and drained of the physical energy needed to make any encounter with me a genuine one. She was simply a company drone, working on the company clock and going through the company script.

As she walked away from my table, I noticed a slight limp in her right step. I bet that hurt. I bet her boss rode her constantly to move faster, to keep up, or worse, to punch out if she couldn’t do this job. She was not the only waitress that I noticed limping. Oh, God, I sighed under my breath, "I have finally found a job that I would hate more than the one I have now."

Waiting for my coffee to cool gave me the opportunity to study the other waitresses. I observed each one faking their own version of genuineness. Each one’s face was strained from physical exhaustion. Each one was robotically lifting, bending, pushing, and pulling nonstop from table to table. I could see that their backs were killing them. Watching those waitresses only confirmed for me how oppressive work—everyone’s work—is today.

There was once a time when people labored with pride in contributing to a good day’s work. Work affirmed a person’s self-esteem and his value to the community. Unfortunately, as our society has become more advanced, the sacred purpose for work has become nearly eradicated by the widespread acceptance of an opposing, equally strong human drive: Greed. Rather than enhancing the value of our contribution, today’s marketplace often oppresses it.

Tragically, waitressing does not have the corner in this market. The majority of us who work under other people do so under relentless, demanding oppression. We are all beaten down at work; it’s not only me. The workplace for many of us has become, not an empowering environment, but an oppressive one. So back to my breakfast…

My attention turned to the pure, black color of the coffee in my mug. I became fascinated with how the coffee created such a flat, smooth, patent leather surface. It took on the characteristics of a mirror, an opaque black mirror.

It was then that I was suddenly inspired to notice how the coffee’s surface was reflecting a perfect mirror image of the window behind me that was illuminating the room. The reflection of the window panes was stark, dazzling white against the dark roast background. The contrast between the dark black and the crisp, dazzling white was mesmerizing. One minute all I saw was a mug of black coffee; the next minute, all I saw was a dazzling neon white image of light shining through the perfectly square panes of a window.

The revelation for me in that moment was that the light had been there all along; I had simply failed to notice it at first. My focus had been on the coffee—on the black—not on the white. I had been captivated by the darkness, not the light. Once I did see the light, however, I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It was a metaphor. It was a moment of Grace.

I had been wrestling with how to introduce the subject matter of this book to my readers. The instant that I saw the reflection of the window in my coffee was a moment of divine revelation. The Holy Spirit had diverted my human eyes in order to open my spiritual eyes. And just like that, there it was! That’s exactly what this book is about! This book is about retraining our focus to see the Light in the midst of the Darkness of our workplace.

This book lays out how I found God and grew into His plan for my life in one of the most unlikely places: my un-Godly and God-forsaken workplace. This book transcribes some of the entries from my personal prayer journals where God taught me how to retrain my focus. This book provides imaginative, day-by-day practice aids for Christians to not only find God in their un-Christian workplace, but to also advance in holiness because of their un-Christian environment. Our goal is to one day stand dazzling white—transfigured like Jesus was—before our Father. This book gives struggling Christians something practical to hold onto while this abrasive world scrubs us that dazzling clean.

Part One

CONFRONTING OUR DEMONS

The Nature of Occupation

When most of us hear the word occupation, we think of our livelihood or job. That is occupation in the physical realm. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, however, says that the word occupation has another definition, one that applies more readily to the spiritual realm. The word occupation is also defined as the taking possession of an area by a foreign military force.

When used in this second context, the word suggests three things of spiritual significance to Christians. First, it suggests warfare, a fight, or a struggle. Secondly, it infers that the takeover is perpetrated by some unwanted, overpowering, outside force. Finally, the definition also identifies the purpose for the struggle: possession.

Two opposing forces are battling to possess the same thing. Whatever this thing is, it must be of great value. Both sides are willing to sacrifice resources and risk casualties in order to acquire it. The war over this valued commodity is neither fun nor fair.

In war, each side engages the other, not only in open, hand-to-hand combat, but also in covert, behind-the-scenes tactics. Espionage, intelligence-gathering, and cloak-and-dagger sabotage are all integral parts of real-life warfare. This unseen aspect of war can actually be more important than the visible aspect. After all, it is the side who gathers the best intelligence on its enemy, who wins. This is the reality of how wars, both natural and spiritual, are fought and won.

Many of us walk into work each day feeling like we are walking into a war zone. In our modern era we endure more stress, more pressure and more demands to perform, out-perform and over-perform than ever before. It is a dog-eat-dog world out there. We are under constant cut-throat pressure to kill or be killed by the competition. Many times, the enemy is within our own camp! We are often pitted against our own coworkers—people who are supposed to be on the same team as us! Team players today undermine, backstab, and swindle their coworkers all the time to gain possession of more sales, more favoritism, and, of course, more commissions.

Many of us work every day, hand in hand with people who engage in covert bad-mouthing, undermining and cut-throat tactics behind our backs. Coworkers who smile to our face at the water cooler are often the same people stabbing us in the back at the boss’s desk. That’s how it is nowadays. This is how the marketplace operates today; it is the business of war. Human casualties are simply considered part of good business.

Haven’t we all tried to de-enlist and go AWOL? How many jobs have you left in order to take a better one elsewhere, only to discover that the grass was not any greener there? Haven’t you ever sighed in relief that you had FINALLY landed the perfect job, only to find yourself within a few months right back at square one, facing the exact same petty, nitpicking personalities? Same problems, just different uniforms. They seem to be waiting for us no matter where we run. We will never be home free of irritating, incompetent and ruthless people until the day we are freed from this life and return home to Heaven.

Spiritual Warfare

The physical pressures of our jobs can take an exhausting and discouraging toll on us. However, there is also a subliminal, unseen pressure wearing us down as well. This covert, cloak-and-dagger force is not discernible to our naked human eye because it is not human; it is spiritual. Though we cannot see it, the spiritual battle surrounding us is as tension-filled and brutal as any real-life battle.

Christians have all fallen victim at one time or another to the wishful thinking that God should shield us from mean and unscrupulous people. We wish that He would simply stretch out His mighty arm and remove all of our human hardships. Thinking like this is not very Christian