Visits to the Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant in my neighborhood helped me to figure out the purpose of work. If you have small children, you know about Chuck E. Cheese’s -– the restaurant with the obnoxious interior that kids love. This is not a restaurant you frequent for the food. They serve pizza but their fame is the atmosphere, defined by numerous arcade games and rides.
When you place your food order at Chuck E. Cheese’s, you also purchase tokens for playing the games. On a busy evening hundreds of kids will be playing, banging on buttons, hitting flippers and tossing balls. Generally a step or two behind each child is a weary parent.
At the conclusion of each game, a machine spits out tickets which represent the child’s winnings. I am not sure whether there is any relationship between the performance of the child during the game and the amount of tickets awarded because it seems like every performance yields a wad of tickets. At the end of your visit, parent and child go to a counter where the tickets can be exchanged for a prize of the child’s choosing.
It took me several visits to Chuck E. Cheese’s to figure this place out. When I first saw the prizes on display and I saw how the kids were instantly attracted to them, I thought: “Why not simply let us buy a prize and give it to our kid? Why make us buy tokens and go through the process of playing all these games?”
It certainly would have been more efficient for the restaurant to simply sell prizes. Chuck E. Cheese’s could save a lot of space if they didn’t have to devote so much room for the basketball machine, the virtual surfing machine, the skill ball machine and every other kind of fair game you can think of. And the place would certainly be a lot quieter so people who did accidentally come to Chuck E. Cheese’s for the food could at least eat in peace.
But then it dawned on me: the prizes are not the point! The point of all those games is to give children and parents an opportunity to build their relationship. The games give the kids and parents a reason to spent time together; it gives them something fun to do together. Chuck E. Cheese’s is about parents and children building their relationship. Sure, the kids get a prize, but the real prize is that the parent and child just spent 45 minutes together strengthening their relationship.
So it is with work. Of course we get paid when we do work in the commercial world, and the compensation is important, but that is secondary. The primary purpose of working is to build a relationship with God, just like the prize is secondary at Chuck E Cheese’s and the time spent with mom and dad is primary.
Because working people spend so much time on the job, this is where they are chiefly defining their relationship with God. Work time is our best opportunity to grow closer to God.
Think again about Matthew 25 where we find the story of the master who went away and gave three servants an opportunity to manage his money in his absence. The two who worked were rewarded with a deeper relationship with the master; the one who did not work was cut off from the master.
Since God provides for us, as the master did for those servants, the purpose of work isn’t so much about earning money to pay the rent or feed the family; it is about growing closer to Him. When you consider how important paying the rent and feeding your family is, you get a sense for how important growing closer to God must be. The primary purpose of work is much more important than its secondary purpose.
The GEO Principle proposes that the purpose of work is to grow closer to God. We will consider the meaning of that purpose in future posts.
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