Importance of Meaning

As I was sitting at work last night, I was struck by a sudden sense of uneasiness. Okay, I’ll confess, I have had this uneasiness for a while now. Sort of like being stuck in a fog, when I am at work, I go from task to task during my busy shift, very mindlessly, feeling very uneasy about the job. But tonight I was struck with the thought of, “What meaning does this have? What is the point of being here, in this moment, right now?”

I will confess that I haven’t really thought that much about the purpose of my job. I work in a corn processing plant as a lab analyst, analyzing the product as it goes through the process of being turned from regular, hard, Indiana-grown corn into various products, including alcohol, maltodextrin, starch, feeds, and other products. I get so caught up in the everyday testing, the monotony of testing things at the same time every day, over and over and over and over. This question— what meaning does this have?—caught me by surprise.

So I stood there, next to one of the many instruments that we use to do our work, just thinking. And then it hit me—these products we are making, so many of them for human consumption, usage in gasoline, feed for animals—they have to be a good quality. They need to be not just within the processing limits set by our customers, but they also need to be safe, quality, products that I would be proud to say I helped produce. I turned to my coworker and asked her, “Have you ever thought of what the purpose is of this?”, and thus ensued a very nice conversation about how we have to know the purpose of what we do if we ever want it to have meaning for us, and how if it doesn’t have meaning, then why would we even come to work each day.

After that conversation, the rest of my night was so different. It wasn’t just the monotony of work. I approached each test as something important I needed to accomplish. Samples and testing that I normally would have been annoyed by were suddenly not so bad after all. A coworker calling in sick, causing me to have to work an hour over when I was supposed to go home, was suddenly not so bad. Because I knew the meaning of why I was working a 12 hour shift, it suddenly meant so much more. And with that came a desire for more… a desire for my work to mean more. I was different. I was changed.

I think that this should be true in all that we do. If we truly open ourselves up to understand the purpose of what we are doing, the deeper meaning behind our work, our friendships, our circumstances, our time with family, then maybe we will allow ourselves to approach each circumstance and event differently—to be changed! Does that mean that we will suddenly understand the meaning of our existence, of God, and of life in general? Probably not right away, but it will bring us so much more openness to the greatness of life and a gratitude for each circumstance as a gift from God—the presence of Christ among us.