A conversation with David.

Q — Why “redeeming work” — what’s in the name?

It’s a phrase doing three jobs at once. First, the redeeming work of Christ — the work on which everything else depends. Second, redeemed work — the labor you and I offer back to God, done with skill and integrity before His face. And third, the redemption of work itself — reforming the systems and cultures that shape how labor is practiced and measured.

Most projects pick one of those lanes. I don’t think you can. They hold each other up.

Q — Where did this begin for you?

In college, I had a professor named Dr. David Naugle who introduced us to Abraham Kuyper and the idea that our faith was meant to engage every sphere of life — every place we work and live. Kuyper said it like this:

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!”

ABRAHAM KUYPER

That lodged in me. I heard it again years later at Acton University, and slowly it began to solidify into a real understanding of what our work — and our role in it as believers — is actually about.

Because work isn’t a consequence of the fall. Go back to Genesis 1 and 2: work is already there, before anything goes wrong. We were made to do two things — work and rest. It’s the dualism that crept in after Genesis 3 that has complicated life for all of us ever since.

The seed of all this was planted late in college. But I’ll be honest — I didn’t really grasp it until my mid-forties.

Q — What do you mean when you say we were never made for dualism?

Start with definitions, because that’s where most of us go wrong.

Dualism did not originate with Plato, but it became popular because he spoke about the spiritual and the physical as separate things, and he elevated the spiritual over the physical. He believed the mind a.k.a the spiritual lasts and the body does not, so he reasoned only spiritual things have real value. The problem with that is that God created all and in the original design the body and spirit were never meant to be seperated. That division of spiritual vs physical has carried down through centuries, and it still shows up when we treat clergy or missionary work as somehow more important than every other profession.

But the separation did not stop there. It crept into all areas of life. We split money into God’s money and my money. We split our behavior into an online self and an in-person self. We even split ourselves from nature, as if we were not part of the created world we are called to tend. If you want to see how that last one plays out, take a look at redeeming.earth.

We hear the word “work” and think only of the thing we get paid to do. But work is everything we do. Maintaining a home. Loving your spouse. Raising children — yes, changing diapers counts. Serving your parents as they age. Helping a neighbor. Volunteering at church, in your community, on the PTA. All of it is work, and it was always meant to be simply integrated into life. It’s just… what we do. Everything is work, unless it’s rest.

The biblical blueprint was integration, not balance. Work six days, rest one.

It helps to remember the world Scripture was written into. It was agrarian. You worked the land, your life centered on family and that land, and if you weren’t working it, you were resting. Six days of labor, one day to stop.

Life is a lot more layered now. You’ve got your primary job, your side hustle, family scattered across the country instead of living down the road. We’re pulled in a hundred directions they never were. But the design holds: six days given to production and usefulness, and one day set apart to rest.

And rest doesn’t mean you stop parenting or stop doing what it takes to live — those are still work, just not work for the sake of production. Rest is enjoying the fruit of your labor. It’s recovering for the week ahead. Most of all it’s reflection — recognizing that God is sovereign and that every skill you have is a gift He gave you to steward.

Even the six days of work are meant to be worship. Thank you, God, for the ability to do this. Thank you for the gifts I get to use well on behalf of Your kingdom and the common good. As Lester DeKoster put it, “Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others.” Or as Luther is often paraphrased — God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does. Every day, using the gifts we’ve stewarded, we make ourselves useful: fighting injustice, bringing order to chaos, strengthening what’s weak, helping people understand one another.

Q — What does it cost when someone gets this wrong?

Here’s the hard part — you don’t always know you’re in it.

You have a day you never planned, and the urgent things just win. One day like that goes by. Then another. Something in you starts to feel unsettled, but either you don’t have the gumption to face it or you don’t know how. And it builds.

Day by day, it ends in regret. You look back on a long series of small decisions and realize you never did the things you actually wanted to do. Your child is grown and heading off to college, and you never did that thing with them. You wish you’d been more present with your wife in a certain season. You said yes to every business trip because it felt exciting, or because you felt you had to please a boss who didn’t actually need pleasing — and every one of those yeses was a no to your family, your home, something that mattered.

And the strangest part: ten years later, you can’t even remember what you traded it for. You can’t recall what was so urgent that day, or what that trip accomplished. You just remember the game you missed. The date nights you didn’t take. The call to your mom you never made.

A life of regret is rarely built on one big wrong turn. It’s built on a hundred small decisions that quietly crowd out the great things with merely good ones.

Q — How do you actually live integration on a chaotic day?

It starts with perspective. If we know what’s most important, the day will define itself around that. If we don’t, the day defines itself for us — the tyranny of the urgent takes over, and the most important things get crowded out.

So plan. If calling a relative matters today, put it on the calendar — otherwise it evaporates. Make room for the big things on purpose.

And then, get better at saying no. We tend to say yes to everything out of a kind of fear of missing out, and we end up full of good things but empty of the great ones. You can’t have it all. But you can have what’s most important to you — if you’re willing to decline the rest.

Q — What are the four redemptive questions, and how do you use them?

I want to be clear about where those come from, because I didn’t invent them. I first heard a version from someone at the Colson Center — Chuck Colson asked questions in this spirit, and John Stonestreet adapted them.

“Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.”

JOHN STONESTREET

That’s exactly why I want to help retire the idea of work–life balance. It’s a bad idea, and it has victims — the people worn out trying to keep a scale level that was never going to balance.

The four questions are simple: Where do I see something good that I can celebrate and protect? Where do I see evil that I should resist? Where is something missing that I can create? Where is something broken that I can restore?

I don’t run through them word-for-word every day anymore, but I live in their spirit constantly. Where I see something good, how do I protect it and keep it going? Well done — let’s keep that moving. Where I see an injustice, how do we correct it? Where a system is broken, how do we improve it? Where there’s chaos, how do we bring order — whether that’s an accountant’s filing system, the papers on my own desk, or a breakdown in communication?

And communication is the big one. It is every organization's primary problem. From where I sit, confusion is the enemy’s favorite tool — especially when people are trying to do good. So often we end up fighting each other when we actually share the same problem and have just misunderstood one another. In the church it’s the same trick: get people arguing over the music style or the carpet color, and no one’s focused on the mission. Point the frustration at the real problem, not at each other.

Underneath all of it is a refusal to settle for the status quo — what can we do to make this better? — held together with keeping paid work in its right place. Our work is good. We should do it well. But it doesn’t belong at the top of the list, and if we give it more than it’s due, we’ll let the most important things slip away.

Q — What would you say to someone whose work feels meaningless — or whose workplace is genuinely toxic?

Those are two different answers. If your work feels meaningless, I’d start with design: there is no ordinary work in God’s economy. Luther said God doesn’t need your good work — but your neighbor does. Your spreadsheet, your classroom, your job site is a place where somebody’s flourishing is at stake.

If your workplace is toxic, that’s not design — that’s distortion, and Scripture is unsparing about it. Naming greed, exploitation, and contempt for people is part of redeeming work, not a departure from it. Sometimes faithfulness means staying and pushing back. Sometimes stewardship means leaving. Both can be obedience.

Q — Why you? Why this message?

Honestly, because of that friendship piece.

This message is true and biblical, and it’s been carried by better voices than mine for a long time. I’m not the beginning or the end of it. But I have people in my life who may never hear those other voices — and I have the chance to be the one who hands them this freedom. That’s reason enough.

Q — What does success look like for redeeming.work?

Fewer exhausted referees. People who stop apologizing for loving their work, and stop pretending their faith goes quiet at nine a.m. Churches that speak about Monday with the same seriousness as Sunday. Leaders measured by the flourishing of the people they lead.

And a growing number of ordinary workers who can name their loves, order them rightly, and rest — really rest — one day in seven.

Q — When someone reads this and closes their laptop, what do you hope shifts?

Just this: stop running the race of trying to keep it all afloat.

Determine the order of your loves, and then make the decisions that support that order. That’s the whole thing.

And a small hint to get you started — it should begin with God.