The Work of Renewal by iyree jarrett

This Sunday we were invited to think more broadly about the things we make, create, cultivate, and contribute to the world around us. What does it look like for the things we give our time, energy, and creativity to become part of God’s ongoing work of renewal? I found myself thinking about the work of writing, creating, the work of being a student, and even the daily work of managing disability. There are so many forms of labor that do not necessarily come with a formal paycheck, but they still shape us and the world around us. From there, I started thinking about my own day-to-day job.

I work for a nonprofit that serves people experiencing homelessness, and sometimes I think about how human it is that my job has to exist at all. The work matters deeply to me, and I care about the people I work alongside and the larger work of creating more housing and safety. At the same time, there is something unsettling about the conditions that make this work necessary in the first place. I believe that people should have housing. People should not have to navigate layers of systems just to have somewhere safe to sleep. While the work I do matters, I also find myself wishing that the conditions producing the need for this work were different. This hope has made me think differently about what it means for my work to participate in God’s renewal. The work of caring for people right now is part of that renewal, and so is imagining and working toward the kind of world where safety, and dignity are not things people have to fight so hard to access.

That brought me back to the part of the message that reminded me that work itself was part of God’s good creation. Sin did not create work. It distorted it, turning cultivation into exploitation and work that could contribute to communal flourishing into work organized around accumulation and self-preservation. I believe that since work is part of God’s good creation, then there is something sacred about all the work we do (even in the brokeness): making art, cooking a meal, picking up a piece of trash, caring for our bodies, studying, tending to a garden, caring for another person. For me, that is part of what it means for our work, in all its different forms (poetry and all), to participate in God’s renewal of all things!