A couple years ago, CBN spent two days in our home filming its Immune Boosting Docu-Series for The 700 Club. This photo caught us mid-conversation in the place where most of our work actually happens. At home with a household of kids running under foot.
The work can be real, the deadlines can be real, and balancing it with seven kids is not optional. That is what our calling looks like in our family of nine: not escaping meaningful work, but refusing to let it crowd out the presence of God, especially during our busiest days.
You can watch the 700 Club Segment here. (Skip to 16:07)
You clock out at six, but your mind never punches the card. Somewhere between the commute and the dinner table, the day’s unfinished list starts running on a loop, and by the time you sit down to pray, you cannot remember the last time work felt like anything other than a scoreboard you are losing.
That ache is not laziness, and it is not ingratitude for a job plenty of people would love to have. It is the ache of a soul doing work that was never meant to define it.
Scripture has more to say about your labor than either the hustle culture selling you more or the burnout culture selling you less, and what it says starts with who you are before it ever touches what you produce.
It also says more about how you find that labor in the first place than most of us were ever taught, and that is the part this article is going to walk through with you, not just tell you.
You are reading Article 5 in our 7-Part Biblical Affirmations Series. Start with Biblical Affirmations for Healing: How to Renew Your Mind With Scripture if you are new to this practice.
Need a quiet moment with God before you dive in? Start with this short prayer…
Where the Calling Actually Found Me
Dr. Z here...
Seventeen years ago I sat in a cubicle in Dow Chemical’s corporate customer support finance division, and on paper I had made it. Steady paycheck, good benefits, a six-figure potential career path that made sense to everyone except me.
Three months after one conversation with a friend at a wellness talk, we sold our condo in Michigan, I walked away from Dow Chemical, and we moved our family to Atlanta so I could start chiropractic school at Life University.
Here is the part most people do not know. I spent five years at that school and never practiced chiropractic a single day.
I fell in love with research and writing instead.
That is not a tidy testimony about following your passion, because I did not feel a passion for research and writing on the day I enrolled.
It is a testimony of trusting God when things change and your plans gets disrupted.
“The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.” — Proverbs 16:9
It is a testimony about a door that closed (a license I earned and never used) and a door that opened somewhere I was not looking, and about staying faithful to the assignment directly in front of me long enough to find out which one God actually meant. That pattern is not unique to us, and we will come back to it later in this article, because it is close to how a calling generally gets revealed.
Somewhere along the way I got called a “health evangelist,” and a friend rebuked me because my focus and ministry path felt to him like a distraction from the Gospel. That stung more than I let on at the time.
Scripture is what settled it for me.
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” — 1 Corinthians 3:6
Somebody plants, somebody waters, and God is the only one who makes anything actually grow, whether that growth happens behind a pulpit or behind a keyboard. Biblical health was never a substitute for the gospel.
It is a dimension of discipleship the American church has largely let go of, and that is the field we were called to plant.
We tell that story because most people carry a quiet question about their work that they rarely say out loud, and it usually sounds like this: does what I do all day actually matter to God?
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” — John 10:10
We call it “occupational health” and it is one of the seven interconnected areas of health that make up the abundant life. It also so happens to be the one area Christians either worship or resent, with almost nobody landing in the middle.
Occupational Health Vs. Financial Stability
Financial stability asks whether you trust God with what is in your bank account.
Occupational health is finding purpose in your work & calling and asks whether you trust Him with what is in your calendar and your identity, the forty, fifty, sixty hours a week where most adults spend the bulk of their waking lives.
Whether you are a successful entrepreneur or a well-to-do homemaker, you can have plenty of money and still be enslaved to your job. You can also be financially stretched and still work with a free soul.
From a Biblical perspective, both land in the same place: the soul, the inner person who either rests in God or performs for an audience that will never be satisfied.
The real war is not over your income. It is over whether your work has quietly become a false god or a burden that pays your bills and steals your peace at the same time.
This article is the practical companion to our cornerstone teaching, Neuroscience Is Catching Up to Romans 12, where we explore how repeated attention and practice shape the brain.
Today, we are building on our cornerstone teaching about what happens inside the brain when you renew your mind with Scripture, because the research behind Romans 12:2 changes how you think about every thought you rehearse about your job.
“I’m grateful to be here, receiving encouragement, recipes, and whole-body transformation. Even after trying times, I trust you and Mama Z. The spiritual aspect completes the system: body, soul, and spirit.”
— Ellen D.
What It Costs When Performance Runs the Show
Let us be precise, because naming a thing correctly is part of getting free from it. Ambition and diligence are not the problem.
Scripture praises both.
The problem is what happens when performance stops being something you do and starts being the thing that tells you who you are. The world has built an entire counterfeit gospel on top of that swap, and it preaches five lines with a straight face:
More hours prove more worth.
A packed calendar proves you matter.
Burnout is a badge, not a warning.
Rest is something you earn after you have done enough, and you never quite finish enough.
Your job title is the honest answer to who you are.
None of that is diligence.
Diligence is a fruit of the Spirit at work in ordinary hours, and it can coexist with rest, with Sabbath, and with a soul that is not for sale.
What that list describes is idolatry wearing a work ethic as a costume, and it burns through marriages, health, and children’s memories of their parents while promising a finish line that keeps moving further away.
Is It Really THAT Bad?
In 2021, the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization published a joint analysis in the journal Environment International, and the topline numbers are hard to look away from.
Working fifty-five hours a week or more carries a thirty-five percent higher risk of stroke and a seventeen percent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to a standard thirty-five to forty-hour week.
The same analysis attributed seven hundred forty-five thousand deaths worldwide in a single year to long working hours, and that burden fell heaviest on men, middle-aged and older workers, and people in the Western Pacific and South-East Asia regions, not primarily on the inbox-and-calendar culture most of us reading this actually live in.
Here is why the number still matters to you even though the study was not built to measure your specific job. Chronic stress hormones flooding a body that never gets the signal to stand down do not check anyone’s job title or tax bracket before they do damage.
If you have ever answered an email from bed at eleven at night, your nervous system was paying a cost that study did not measure directly, but the underlying mechanism behind that headline number applies to you too.
A work-ruled life has a look to it, and most of us can spot it in the mirror faster than we would like:
Answering email at ten at night because stopping feels like quitting.
Vacation days that pile up unused because taking them feels like falling behind.
An identity crisis the moment a job ends, a business fails, or retirement arrives.
A nervous system that never fully powers down, even on a Sunday.
The same principle applies to short sleep, skipped meals, caffeine standing in for rest, dehydration, artificial fragrance in a closed office, screens running late into the night, and days spent sitting still from the first meeting to the last. We walked through our inflammatory-food framework in Why Christians Can’t Lose Weight.
The pattern to notice is simple: when your body consistently feels worse after a habit, that habit is probably also making it harder to do your work with a free soul.
The answer is not to blame yourself for every hard week or to treat your calendar as the single cause of burnout. The answer is to become curious and honest about the whole person, and to actually learn how a calling gets discerned instead of guessing at it.
That is where we are headed next…
“Thank you so much for everything you all do, and especially today for the Scriptures. I really needed those today.”
— Mary G.
Ecclesiastes 4:6: A Handful of Quietness
Solomon built more than any of us ever will. He had the budget, the labor force, the wisdom, and the results, and when he sat down to write about all of it, he did not call striving impressive.
He called it wind.
“Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.” — Ecclesiastes 4:6
Two hands full of toil sounds like success on paper. Read it again and notice what the verse is actually comparing, because it is not comparing work against laziness.
It is comparing a full hand you can rest in against two full hands you cannot put down.
Whatever you are white-knuckling right now to prove you have not fallen behind, God is not asking you to grip it tighter. He is asking you to open your hand.
Renewing the Mind and Reclaiming Your Calling
Grind culture treats your mind as the obstacle: the doubt, the fatigue, the nagging sense that you are behind, all things to override with more effort. Scripture treats your mind as the starting point instead.
“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” — Colossians 3:2
That is not permission to ignore the inbox, but an order of operations.
A mind still running on the old scoreboard, more hours prove more worth, will misread even a real calling as one more performance to win. A mind being renewed asks a different question about the same job: not “am I doing enough,” but “is this actually what God has put in front of me, and how do I know.”
God reveals a calling through Scripture, through the gifts He already gave you, through the responsibilities already sitting in front of you, through wise counsel, through the doors He opens and closes, and through simple faithfulness in the small next thing.
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Your Bible Health Swap This Week
#015: Work & Purpose Tool Kit
This week’s Swap includes the Calling Inventory, Hustle and Burnout Trigger Audit, Commit-Your-Work Reflection, 7-Day Sabbath-and-Work Plan & Daily Work-as-Worship Reset!
One Swap this week. One faithful step. A transformed life.
Learn more about the Bible Health Transformation Journey and start wherever you are.
“It has truly been amazing for me and my family as we find natural and Biblical ways to improve our health and wellbeing in our home.”
— Wendy J.
