Work.
The year is 2002. A city girl from Glasgow starts her first ‘proper’ job at Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust. She is 21, a newly qualified physiotherapist, and you can tell because her Scottish accent is too strong for patients to understand and her new uniform still has a crisp whiteness to it.
The world of work begins.
There’s much that goes along with work. It’s not just being at work itself; there’s the physical energy you spend being there, but there’s also the mental energy of the task and the emotional energy of dealing with people. Job satisfaction restores some of that spent energy, tasks get easier with experience and require less mental thought, and colleagues can become friends for life. Energy is spent, but also restored. Energy balance which is in credit or energy balance which is ‘in the red’ may directly affect how you feel about work when you wake in the morning.
When I first started at Mid Yorks I didn’t drive — the two buses and the 90 min commute from Ossett to Pontefract was pretty painful. But once I was there, I genuinely did love my job. Being a physio is the best job! (To me!) I’m very thankful for the privilege of enjoying what I do, I know that’s not everyone’s experience. There were of course highs and lows. A good mentor making equipping me with skills for life. A bad manager sapping enthusiasm. Cake Fridays. A missed promotion. Cake Birthdays. Overloading on paperwork. A pain free patient. You’ll have highs and lows in your job too.
So I loved my job, and was totally prepared for highs and lows but there was always that nagging voice in the back of my head. The voice that whispered “Is this it?”, “You’re too tired from this to really enjoy life”, “Is this all you want to be known for?”, “Where’s the adventure in this?” and other such helpful nags! Perhaps the biggest nag of all was “If only I didn’t work I’d have more time for God and I could be more involved in his ministry.” You see work was great, but my faith convinced me that there was more to life than just work. I felt increasingly that work just ‘got in the way’ of what I wanted to do for God. Surely I could be a much more effective Christian… if I just didn’t have to work!
This was my wrestle.
When a friend of mine who was an Occupational Therapist in Leeds invited to me to a conference for Christian Allied Health Professionals I went along, but really wasn’t expecting too much. By this point in my career I was a Senior Physio but in truth I was looking for how I could do less, not more in the NHS. I will never forget that conference. I could not tell you who was the keynote speaker, or even where it was held, but I can tell you how God spoke to me through it. Lots of the talks during the day were about the boundaries placed on Christians in the workplace, the constrictions of being a professional person, where sharing faith was off limits in the clinical setting. This reinforced my wanting to do less mind-set. Then on the last session of the day, someone got up and spoke about the Parable of the Sower. I have heard that story thousands of times. The story of the farmer sowing his seed, it falling on different soil. Yeah, I know it.
This time God spoke.
You see I can remember as clear as day the person telling me of my responsibility to be a sower of seed. In my work I am a sower of seed. I may have constraints placed on me, I’m not likely to pray for a patients healing or salvation with them! But I can sow seed. I can pray for the patients on my list before I see them. I can display the fruit of the Spirit to those I come across.
I can treat people the way Jesus would have treated them.
The transformational power that comes when I look at my list in the morning when I get to work and say ‘Lord, help me to sow your seed today’. You see it’s not our job to decide where the seed lands, where the seed takes root, or even if it bears fruit. We are called to be sowers. This was huge for me. Work no longer became a hindrance to knowing and serving God. Me at work WAS knowing and serving God. There was no distinction between physio work and ministry — ALL OF LIFE IS MINISTRY. It totally changed the way I prayed on my way to work (by this time driving to Pinderfields!). It totally changed the way I dealt with the ‘difficult’ patient that I would have normally wanted to rush through. It changed the way I listened to social history. It changed the way I viewed lunchtime chat. It gave me more compassion. More empathy. It made me more like Jesus.
Still working now.
Those of you that know me, know I don’t still work in the NHS at the moment. I now have the great privilege of working as a physio privately and working at Christchurch. Privilege it really is. I often wonder if God made me wait to serve him in ministry in the church before I learned that my NHS work was also ministry, just in a different place. I’m totally thankful for that lesson. It took me years (literally) to get it. I’m still learning it. When I have a day where I’m chasing my tail. Where time schedule has gone out the window, when I’m focused too much on task over people…
I stop. I am a farmer. A sower. In all of life. Glory be to God.
Judith Gibson, Pastoral Assistant, Christchurch
