Yee Lim Shin—Staff Writer

What good is work and what is good work? These were the underlying questions asked during the PLIA trip in Colorado Springs.

The two organizations that we worked with were the Evangelical Christian Academy (ECA) and Summit Ministries. The ECA, an accredited K-12 Christian school in Colorado Springs, offered a Christian perspective for students to thrive in. Summit Ministries, a conference program, provided a place for Christians to explore the hard questions and topics of Christianity, guiding and showing them how to face the different worldview issues in society today.

Photo by Alexa DeRuyter

During our PLIA trip, we were encouraged to explore the meaning of work, and what it should look like in the lives of Christians. While painting, taking down beds, leveling out the ground with rocks, mulching or putting up beds, we were told to think about the true work God created us to do and how we should carry it out in this world.

Every morning before working at the Summit Ministries, we had devotions, discussing Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration, and how work was connected to all of them.

Work was not something created after the Fall, but was something God gave us to do from the beginning: tending the Garden and ruling over everything in it. God created everything in this world and said it was good. Everything we did, from mulching to team-building was considered work.

We are called to shape the culture we live in today, especially in how it perceives work, through our thoughts and actions. The gospel said that we absolutely need each other, and that no work should be considered above another kind of work.

We integrated PLIA’s theme of “What is love?” into our main theme in Colorado Springs by connecting love with work. We saw that work was not just your job, but everything you did. Work was good and created by God. By working hard in whatever we did, we were sharing our faith and God’s love to those who saw that the way we worked was different.