This is a keynote address I gave at the National Association of Baptist Enrollment Professionals Conference at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor this past week. Hope it’s helpful! Intro So you’re here at this conference for a number of reasons: to learn from others, to grow as a team, to network, to develop, because your boss said so. All good reasons to be here. And yet as our theme suggests, the reason for being here behind all those other reasons for being here is that you hope to be, in some sense, refreshed. It’s been a long year for you. Some of you have done lots of traveling—lots of living out of a suitcase, lots of nights alone in a hotel, lots of time spent in front of a booth talking to sometimes pleasant but often clueless and obnoxious high-schoolers. Some of you have done lots of campus tours. Some of you have made lots of phone calls. And some of you have done lots of planning to make sure all the traveling and campus touring and phone calling are being done in the right way, by the right people, at the right time, to ensure you get the right students in the right amount at your university come late August. Like I said, it’s been a long year, and next year, you do it all over again. And so you’re here to be refreshed because all of this is draining. Or to put it bluntly, you’re here because your job sucks. Now don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that your job is bad or un-enjoyable or something like that. I mean that your job, like all jobs, has a sneaky way of reaching down into your soul and taking things from you—important things like energy, joy, passion. Why do our jobs take these things from us, and how do we get them back? Ecclesiastes 1:2-11 The book of Ecclesiastes starts off with a rather depressing poem: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.“ Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them. Hebel As I said, this is depressing stuff. The writer looks at all the work that humans do—all the jobs and tasks and roles—and he says “Hebel, Hebel, completely hebel. Everything is hebel.” This Hebrew word hebel means something like meaningless, pointless, absurd. Humans busy themselves with all of this work, it consumes our lives, and yet in the end we’re nothing more than ants, moving dirt around in circles, building up little mounds that won’t last long and might as well not exist. Round and round and round we go and yet none of it matters. And you know this voice: the voice that says hebel, the voice that says “meaningless, pointless, absurd,” the voice that says your work doesn’t matter. It’s usually a whisper more than a shout—mocking your efforts, ridiculing your importance, accusing you of wasting your time. It wounds you, but not in obvious, auspicious ways. It’s more like…death by paper cuts. Zombies I mean, we’ve all seen people who died in their jobs while they’re still living. They’re there, but they’re not really there. Something is gone, that light behind their eyes has gone out. They’re zombies, performing tasks but dead on the inside, living for a paycheck, hanging on for the next vacation so they can come back to life for a few days. And here’s the thing: nobody wants to be that person. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that none of you took your job so you could slowly die on the inside. That wasn’t one of the benefits in your package. But make no mistake—better people than you have died in their jobs, and if you don’t do something about it, that voice that says hebel, meaningless, pointless will get the best of you too, and it’ll be death by paper cuts. Because a human being can endure many difficult things in his or her work (crushing failures, nagging co-workers, ridiculous hours)—we can endure all this with a remarkable buoyancy and joy. But meaninglessness is the one burden we cannot bear for long and live to tell the tale. You need to do work that means something. Todd I have a friend named Todd who works harder than anyone I’ve ever met. He runs a rehabilitation home for addicts, and seven days...