I used to push carts across the lot and watch the gas station on my breaks, running the vision for the company I wanted to build through my head one more time. The job itself was never a passion. It still isn’t. But somewhere in those breaks I stopped treating the cart corral and the pumps as something to get through and started treating every task, every coworker, and every slow stretch of downtime like I was already running my own business. Work as worship is the idea that flipped that for me, and it had nothing to do with suddenly loving the job.
This isn’t a devotional about journaling your way into liking a shift you don’t like. It’s a practical look at four specific shifts in how you show up, built from actually treating a job I never loved as training for the business I was building on the side.
In This Post
- What Work as Worship Actually Means
- Why I Started Treating a Job I Never Loved Like Training
- Four Shifts That Make Work as Worship Real
- Start This Week
- What to Avoid
- The Point
What Work as Worship Actually Means
Plain definition first. Work as worship means treating the actual task in front of you, not the task you wish you had, as something done for God rather than for a manager, a customer, or a paycheck. Colossians 3:23 says it directly: whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters. That verse doesn’t carve out an exception for the parts of your day that feel beneath you. It says whatever you do.
This posture was never a statement about which job you have. It’s a statement about what you bring to the job you currently have, including the one you’re trying to leave.
It doesn’t require passion. You don’t have to feel inspired by pushing carts or watching a gas station for eight hours. The posture is available on the days you feel nothing at all.
It changes who you’re actually working for. The moment the audience shifts from your manager to God, the question stops being whether anyone will notice and becomes whether you actually did the work well.
Why I Started Treating a Job I Never Loved Like Training
I never loved this job, and I’m not going to pretend I do now. What changed wasn’t my feelings about pushing carts or watching a gas station for eight hours. What changed is that I started running the vision for the company in my head on every break instead of just killing the clock, and then carrying that same intensity back onto the floor once the break ended.
I’d already written about the unseen reps that decide who you become, and I believed every word of it. But writing about unseen reps and actually treating a cart corral like a training ground, on a job that was never going to be my calling, turned out to be two different disciplines. I think about it now the same way I think about building the tunnel before you need the water. The reps on a job you don’t love happen long before anyone sees the business they were training you for.
Four Shifts That Make Work as Worship Real
These aren’t abstract principles. They’re the specific shifts that changed how I pushed carts, watched a gas station, and talked to coworkers while I built the vision for Dig Deep Health in my head the whole time.
Shift 1: Work for an Audience of One
Attribution changes the standard. When the only audience is someone who already knows everything you do, the quality of your work can’t depend on who’s watching. I started asking one question on the parts of my shift nobody checks: would I do this the same way if my manager were standing right here. For a long time the honest answer was no.
Shift 2: Use the Boring Minutes, Don’t Just Survive Them
Pushing carts across a lot and watching a gas station are two of the most mindless tasks you can hand someone. Nothing about either one requires thought. That’s exactly why they became useful to me. On breaks, instead of scrolling or killing time, I ran the vision for the company through my head again. What the next offer looked like. What I’d say to the next person who asked about it. What the business actually needed from me that week.
Nobody was grading those breaks. Nobody even knew they were happening. That’s the actual test of this posture. Anyone can look focused when someone’s watching. The real work is what you do with ten unsupervised minutes between pushing carts and clocking back in. If you’re weighing whether to start something on the side of a schedule like this, it’s worth counting the cost honestly before you commit the hours, because those minutes are the actual cost.
Shift 3: Treat Every Coworker Like They’re Already on Your Team
This was the harder shift. It’s easy to be excellent on tasks nobody sees. It’s harder to be excellent with people you didn’t choose to work alongside, who have no idea you’re building something else on the side. I started treating every coworker, the ones easy to get along with and the ones who weren’t, the way I’d want a teammate treated if this were already my own company. Not performing leadership. Just paying attention, pulling weight, and not writing anyone off because they’re not part of where I’m headed.
That shift didn’t make the job meaningful. It made me someone who could be trusted to run a team later, because I’d already been practicing it on people who had nothing to do with my business.
Shift 4: Separate Your Worth From Your Title
The schedule doesn’t know what you’re building at home. Your title doesn’t either. That posture means your identity isn’t actually sitting in either one, and Luke 16:10 backs that up more directly than I expected the first time I read it closely: whoever is faithful in very little is also faithful in much. Pushing carts and watching a gas station is the very little. Treat it that way and you’ll know what to do with the much when it shows up.
Start This Week
- Use your next break to work the vision instead of killing time on your phone. Ten minutes thinking through the next move for what you’re building, not scrolling.
- Read Colossians 3:23 to 24 once a day for five days before your shift starts, slowly enough to actually think about it instead of checking a box.
- Pick one coworker you’d normally tune out and treat them like they’re already on your team for one full shift. Notice what that costs you and what it doesn’t.
- Protect one day this week where you don’t touch your side project at all. A real day of rest, not just a day off from the job.
- Tell one person, a spouse, a friend, a mentor, that you’re trying to work this way, so someone can call you on it when you slip.
- At the end of the week, write one sentence about what changed in how you worked, not in how you felt about the job.
What to Avoid
This is not a reason to stop pursuing a better fit, a promotion, or the exit you’re actually working toward. It’s how you work while you’re still there.
Performing it for an audience undoes it. The moment you start doing excellent work so people notice you’re a hard worker, you’ve swapped one human audience for another. The posture only holds up if it’s mostly private.
Using it to excuse a genuinely harmful workplace misses the point entirely. There’s a real difference between a schedule you don’t love and a workplace that’s actually unsafe or abusive. This is for the first one, not a reason to tolerate the second.
Expecting the resentment to vanish overnight will set you up to quit the practice. Mine took months, not days, and some days it still shows up. The goal was never a permanent feeling. It’s a posture you can keep returning to.
The Point
Most people are waiting for a different job, a better schedule, or more freedom before they decide to work with excellence. This flips the order. You bring the excellence to the job you have now, including the parts you’d rather skip, and let that be what’s actually consistent while the job itself eventually changes.
Pushing carts and watching a gas station ends at a set time either way. What you build in how you worked it doesn’t.
If you’re working a schedule that leaves little room for anything else and trying to build something on the side anyway, I’d like to hear how you’re holding both. Reply, or take the Reset Assessment if you want help building a system instead of just gritting your teeth through it. We publish something every week on health, wealth, and the discipline it takes to steward both. Build a life worth stewarding.
I am not a pastor or a theologian. This reflects what I’ve learned applying a couple of specific passages to an ordinary work schedule, not a formal teaching on the text. Read Colossians 3 and Luke 16 for yourself, and talk to people in your own church community about how they apply to your season.