This time of year, as so many people return from vacations and summer schedules (or don’t because they couldn’t get away in the first place), I think a lot about work and how it relates to worship. I find both in a multifaceted, multifunctional Hebrew word, avodah.

Throughout Scripture, the term is related to service and can mean worship, work, and offering sacrifices to God—all of which overlap in everyday ways for us in the twenty-first century. I had this pointed out to me well before I went to seminary. My good friend David Miller, who now heads up the Faith and Work Initiative at Princeton University, has keyed off that nifty etymology to forge new ways to think about work as worship, and vice versa.

Over the years, pondering the multidimensionality of that word has helped me in several ways. See if any of these works for you:

1. Holding “work” and “worship” together—almost feeling them physically in my palms—helps erode the divide many of us feel between these two parts of life. On one side, we have intentional gathered worship or perhaps our alone-time prayer. On the other, there’s the noisy everyday world of commuting, workplace logistics, colleagues, bosses, deadlines, child care, money, and just dashing through everything from waking the kids up in the morning to falling back into our own beds at night. Holding work and worship together can startlingly reveal how much we unthinkingly assume that they were separate in the first place—and how we may have structured our inner lives on that false assumption without ever realizing it.
2. Thinking of work and worship as two ways of describing one thing broadened the meaning of both for me. There’s enough room in a life for separated work and worship when we keep them nicely compartmentalized. But when we let the words start to wake up and stretch, they bump into each other and overtake each other. And then they start to overlap. And then they start to look more and more the same. Such as:
3. A broader definition of “work.” Work can be what we do for a living, a livelihood, or a vocation (and the shades of difference among those things is another cool chat in itself). But it’s also what we mull over, what we do automatically (say, around the house) or what we feel is effective—in other words, what “works.” Thinking of all of this work as worship, as sacrifices offered, has helped me see the sacramental in all these areas of my life.
4. And then seeing my worship as work. But this doesn’t mean it’s tiring or compulsory. With the larger sense of “work” as service to God, I can see my worship/work as intentional and active (as opposed to the passivity of much traditional worship). I have begun to see worship as something yearning to reach into all the parts of my life.

Worship is meant to call out everything that’s inside us, in the same way that our work lives are meant to. I’m not sure how good we are at doing that in worship one hour a week, but if I think about worship as part of my overall full-self work in the world, then I feel more of my energy, initiative, and gifts coming into worship as well as into my work.

In short, work calls up the deepest parts of our selves, sometimes just to survive, but also to understand who we are in the world. And worship reminds us that all of those things—all of them—are holy. Which in turn might help shake up some old assumptions that were holding us back.

So how does this strike you? If anything lit up for you—if it made a “ping” like a cell-phone alert, as I say in my own worshiping community—then sit with it. Play with it; that can be a great form of prayer in itself. Sketch out ideas, do word associations. Have fun, go deep. Listen.

And your “sitting” can include others. You can slowly begin to bring your colleagues and congregants into these meditations and see what you can harvest from guided conversation around it. Already have work/worship as a strong component of your ministry and community? Terrific. Then maybe revisit these questions to ask afresh how your next steps are unfolding.

Either way, it’s about recognizing that the old sacred/secular distinction is one of those assumptions that was never true in the first place. And that recognition wakes us to a new level of seeing with the heart, whatever day of the week it is.