Review: “Where’s God On Monday?”

The Antidote to the Daily Grind. What does God have to do with cleaning toilets and productivity reports? Everything. People were designed to work in partnership with God. When you find yourself rightly aligned with God’s perspective, your daily work takes on a higher level of excitement and significance. Everything you do can be transformed into an act of worship.

In Where’s God on Monday? authors Alistair Mackenzie and Wayne Kirkland seek to bridge the growing “chasm” between Sunday and Monday. “Our daily work is part of our service to God,” they write. When you realize the relevance of God in your everyday tasks, your work takes on a new, fuller meaning.

So says the little blurb about this book on the publisher’s website. The title, “Where’s God on Monday?” (WGoM) certainly has a nice ring to it and for those of us in full-time paid employment it can certainly feel like that on Monday morning. Mondayitis, as it is affectionately known, will hit any working person at some stage in their career.

I started fulltime employment in my current place approximately 18 months ago and was given this book as a gift from a sister in Christ. 18 months later I have finished the book – though it didn’t take me that long to read!

It’s a relatively small book to go through. I spent most of my public transport time (approx 1 hour per day) going through the book slowly and it took me about a week to read. It’s also a relatively easy book to get your head around and its message is simple and clear.

WGoM is also one of the few books I have seen solely devoted to the topic of work. Most other books I have come across deal with the topic in small ways.

I generally found the book quite insightful in its treatment of ‘work’. There were many useful guides and suggestions to help Christians reorient their thinking in relation to their paid occupations, and there were also a few challenges which I did not expect.

One such challenge was to change the way we approach the divide between ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ work. Our secular work tends to encompass that 9am-5pm (sometimes earlier and later) job which we get paid for and our spiritual work refers to all that voluntary stuff we do for church and outside communities. According to the authors, the division between the two has its roots in the historical development of Christianity and not within the bible itself. Thus the challenge to reshape our approach to the two – to see that ultimately there is no division between the two in a biblical sense – is still something I’m trying to grapple with within my own employment context.

That said, one downside to the book is the lack of a thorough exegesis. WGoM takes quite a few quotes out of ‘The Message’ paraphrase bible, which in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but exploration into passages is not deep. However towards the end I was able to see that in doing so the authors avoided tangential biblical exposition in order to have the book read more easily.

In all I found the book helpful in its discussion of the topic of work. There was enough in there to challenge my current thinking in relation to my ‘job’ and also encourage me to do more so that my presence in the office would be a glorifying to God.