One of the more damaging lies modern people tell themselves is that their spiritual life happens somewhere else.
It happens at church. On retreat. In prayer. In silence. In the early morning with coffee and a Bible. It happens in those elevated moments when the world is quiet and the soul is receptive.
And then there is work.
Work, by contrast, is what interrupts the spiritual life. Work is the place of pressure, deadlines, politics, compromise, anxiety, ambition, performance reviews, layoffs, budgets, and emails sent by people who would never dare speak to another human being that way in person. Work is the place where the soul goes to get bruised.
But what if that is backwards?
What if, for many people, work is not what interrupts the spiritual life, but one of the main places where it is exposed?
That was the central insight in my recent conversation with Richard Strilowich on Created in the Image of God. Richard spent more than forty years in the corporate and IT world, including leadership at IBM, and now works as a coach helping professionals treat their careers as a spiritual path. That language will strike some people as unusual, but the underlying truth should not. It is really just another way of saying something scripture has been saying all along: you do not stop being a creature of God when you walk into the office.
Or, to put it more bluntly: your career is not separate from your spiritual path.
I can relate to that deeply.
When I resigned from ministry in the mid-1990s and entered the corporate world in order to better provide for my family, I did not see that move in spiritual terms. Quite the opposite. I wanted to separate my faith from my paycheck. I had had enough of one world and thought perhaps the other would at least be more straightforward. It was not. I sometimes say I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
The corporate world has its own liturgies, its own priesthood, its own sacrifices, its own moral language, and its own evasions. It also has its own rewards. But what it does not have is neutrality. No human system is neutral, because no human being is neutral. Wherever human beings gather, questions of truth, power, loyalty, fear, vanity, courage, and conscience will arise sooner or later.
Which is why I so often return to the same basic framework: God is the teacher, scripture is the curriculum, and creation is the laboratory.
That laboratory includes boardrooms, break rooms, budgets, code, spreadsheets, sales calls, restructurings, and all the rest of it.
Richard described his own journey in language I found both candid and illuminating. He did not begin by seeing his corporate life as sacred. He began, as many do, simply by trying to do good work. He was drawn to software development, then into leadership, then into the complicated human world that surrounds institutional life. Along the way he discovered what so many people discover: the external success does not resolve the internal tension.
It often intensifies it.
He spoke of an inner pain and discontent in the corporate environment, especially amid the politics and pressures of organizational life. He described feeling that there had to be a better way. That phrase matters. For many people, the spiritual path does not begin in serenity. It begins in dissonance. Something is off. Something is divided. Something does not fit. A man may be outwardly successful and inwardly starved.
Ecclesiastes knows this territory well. So does Jesus.
“What shall it profit a man,” Christ asks, “if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). That is not merely a warning against spectacular greed. It is also a warning against any form of success that hollows out the center. Likewise, when Jesus says, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33), he is not condemning material provision. He is establishing order. First things first. What is ultimate? What is subordinate? What governs what?
And this is where Richard’s phrase becomes so important: your corporate career is your spiritual path.
Not because every corporate structure is good. Not because every decision required of us in modern institutions is just. Not because the office is a monastery. It is not. But because the pressures of work reveal us. They show us what we fear, what we worship, what we will rationalize, what we will endure, and where we are still divided.
In school, I have often said, you get the lesson and then you take the test. In life, you get the test and then, if you are willing, you learn the lesson.
The workplace is one of the great testing grounds.
That is why I think Richard’s most important contribution in our conversation was not the pleasant language about integration, though that matters. It was the hard story. The moral crisis.
He described having to lay off numerous employees over a period of time. One case in particular stayed with him. He had given one man the highest possible performance rating, and then was required to deliver the legal fiction that the layoff was due to performance. He knew it was not true. The man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the script was the script.
Now here is where many spiritual conversations become sentimental or evasive. They move too quickly to peace, to acceptance, to mystery. But conscience does not permit that. There are moments when “I was just following orders” is not enough. In fact, it is almost never enough.
I pressed on that point in our conversation because it matters. There is no amount of calm language about grace that turns falsehood into truth. There is no serenity that absolves a man from having participated in a lie simply because the lie was institutionalized. Institutions often normalize what individual conscience should resist.
And yet — and this is where the matter becomes difficult and human — the fact that a situation is morally compromising does not mean God is absent from it. Very often it is precisely there, in the place of moral strain, that the deeper spiritual struggle begins.
Richard connected that experience to a heart event, an emergency stent, and then depression. I do not pretend to draw a neat line between those things. Life is more mysterious than that. Jesus himself spoke of the tower of Siloam that fell and killed eighteen people and asked whether they were worse sinners than others. “I tell you, Nay” (Luke 13:4–5). Time and chance happen to all. Not every suffering is a coded message.
But neither is suffering meaningless.
Paul says in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” He does not say all things are good. He says they work together for good. That is a very different claim. The layoff may not be good. The lie may not be good. The depression may not be good. The heart event may not be good. But God, who is not the author of confusion, is still able to work through the wreckage of human systems, human weakness, and human compromise to bring a person into deeper truth.
That seems to be what happened for Richard.
He went searching. Retreats, books, self-help, somatic work, spiritual direction, the long and winding path by which a man slowly discovers that what he thought was interruption was in fact invitation. He came to see that he had been splitting his life in two: spirituality over here, work over there. Recharging over here, pressure over there. God over here, corporate reality over there. But the split itself was part of the problem.
“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). If that is true, then one does not leave God at the retreat center and pick Him back up on the weekend. One does not become a spiritual being only in private and a functional machine in public. If we are created in the image of God, then all of life belongs to Him. Not just worship. Not just prayer. Work too.
That does not make every work demand legitimate. It does not remove the need for courage. It does not mean conscience should be silenced in the name of productivity. Quite the opposite. It means the spiritual life is present precisely where those conflicts arise.
The office can be a laboratory of the soul.
That phrase may sound grandiose, but it is really quite concrete. It means that pressure reveals character. Delay reveals patience or the lack of it. Competition reveals envy or discipline. Ambition reveals whether it is rightly ordered or disordered. Conflict reveals whether we love truth more than approval. Success reveals whether we can receive material benefit without making it our god. Failure reveals whether our identity was ever rooted in titles to begin with.
And yes, sometimes the test is brutal.
I know something of that. My own body forced these questions on me in a different way. I have spoken elsewhere about the autoimmune diagnosis I received at twenty-eight and the prediction that I would be in a wheelchair by forty. Whatever else one says about these things, they can expose the contradictions we are trying to live with. They can force a reckoning. They can reveal that our categories are too narrow, our dualisms too rigid, our theology too abstract, and our lives too divided.
The answer is not to worship work, but rather work can be worship. It is not something to flee from it as though material reality were beneath God. The answer is perspective. The answer is integration. The answer is to understand that the material world is not outside divine concern. It is the very setting in which obedience, wisdom, truthfulness, endurance, and surrender must be learned.
Richard put it simply in effect, if not always in these words: grace has been guiding all along.
I think that is right, provided we say it carefully. Grace does not mean every event is pleasant. It does not mean every system is just. It does not mean every wound is immediately intelligible. It means that God has not abandoned His creation, and that even the painful tests of life can become occasions for transformation if we do not harden ourselves against what they are showing us.
So no, your career is not interrupting your spiritual life.
It may be the place where your spiritual life is most truly being tested.
And if that is so, then the real question is not how to escape that fact, but how to meet it faithfully: with conscience awake, with scripture in hand, with enough humility to learn the lesson after the test, and with enough faith to believe that even here — in the maze, in the pressure, in the moral strain — God has not ceased to teach.
If you missed my conversation with Richard Strilowich, you can find it on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series. And as always, remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
Sneak Peek
Because I am a bit behind in the written sequence, the sneak peek items below are about the next essays drawn from conversations that have already aired and are available on YouTube.
Next up is my conversation with Mandy Smith, pastor, author, and ministry leader, reflecting on the strength found in human limitation and on how vulnerability can become one of a leader’s greatest gifts. That is a subject close to the heart of this entire series, because we do not image God by pretending to be self-sufficient. We image him, in part, by learning trust, dependence, and faithful presence within our limits.
After that, I will reflect on the special tribute to John L. Esposito, whose life and work helped shape modern understanding of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. That conversation turns toward scholarship, pluralism, public witness, and the difficult but necessary work of pursuing understanding without surrendering conviction.
So that is what is ahead in writing, even though the shows themselves have already aired. In the meantime, you can watch both on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.
And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
