When George Bernard Shaw and other turn-of-the-century utopians tried to envision what the intersection of life and work would be like by the close of the millennium, they imagined a world where people would work just a few hours a day to meet their material needs so that they could spend the rest of their time nurturing their souls.

Americans seem increasingly interested in nurturing their souls. But, curiously, many Americans appear to be trying to feed their souls through work rather than apart from it. "Work is a secular religion that is spreading," University of Iowa professor Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt recently told The Wall Street Journal. And the workplace is an almost sacred place or hallowed ground for many Americans.

Indeed, when University of California sociologist Arlie Hochschild went inside a Fortune 500 company several years ago to investigate work-family tensions, she found that many white-collar workers with families weren't complaining about spending long hours at the office. Instead, Hochschild discovered that many people today view the workplace as a kind of sanctuary where they can find refuge from the pressures and responsibilities of family life and can find personal worth and dignity in various career accomplishments.

Not surprisingly, Chuck Colson believes there is a problem with the "secular religion" of work. But the way this outspoken follower of Christ defines this problem may surprise some. For Colson is not itching to see America fulfill George Bernard Shaw's dream of minimizing work hours. In fact, Colson co-authored a book on the work ethic decline titled, Why America Doesn't Work (Word, 1991). And Colson says he often spends as many hours today working as the founder and leader of Prison Fellowship Ministries as he did back in his heady White House days as a key advisor to President Nixon.

Moreover, Colson believes that it is not only possible for our souls to be fed through productive work, but that it is desirable.

"One of the biggest myths out there is that there is this dichotomy between your spiritual life and your work life, between Sunday morning when you go to worship and the rest of the week when you work in the dog-eat-dog marketplace," Colson says. "But I believe God has important work for each of us to do - and I believe that we won't be happy unless we are striving to be successful at it."

So what, then, is Colson's beef with the "secular religion" of work? If work is a high calling rather than a necessary evil - and if it is better to be working hard than hardly working - why isn't Colson wholeheartedly saluting those modern-day Jacobs who dream of climbing the Ladder of Success?

The reason, Colson says, is that many of the folks who are pressing for success in the marketplace are chasing after the wrong thing. They are furiously trying to build a personal Tower of Babel that testifies to their great skill and know-how. Yet, when they stop building their careers and their wealth long enough to take stock of their lives, Colson says, they often find that their lives are empty and their work lacks ultimate meaning.

Colson knows what he's talking about. In fact, he says that one of the things many people do not know about his own personal journey is that he was experiencing "a sense of emptiness" in his life months before the Watergate scandal really hit the fan. "After the 1972 campaign was over and we had re-elected the President, I had this feeling of `so what?' " Colson recalls. "It had been an exciting ride for a 41-year-old guy, but I began to question whether it would really have lasting significance."

Colson is hardly alone. In his highly acclaimed book, Halftime (Zondervan, 1997), Bob Buford says that many successful men go through a soul-searching period at midlife where they begin to ask the question singer Peggy Lee made famous: "Is that all there is?" As one highly successful, Harvard-educated businessman told Buford, "I was always finding out that beyond the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there's a sort of emptiness."

Or, as author Leonard Woolf recently observed in Wireless Age magazine, "I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the past five to seven years would be exactly the same if I had played Ping-Pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make a rather ignominious confession that I have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work."

Interestingly, Buford says the search for significance often arises when those in high-status positions are at the top of their game professionally. And Joseph O'Donnell of the Dartmouth Medical School would probably agree. In a recent column in the journal Academic Medicine, O'Donnell describes a "curious paradox" now facing the medical community. "While medicine is becoming capable of doing more and more for patients, health-care professionals are becoming less and less satisfied with their work," he says. "People burn out not from doing hard work, but from doing work that is without meaning."

Like Buford, Colson does not believe there is anything inherently wrong with financial success - that once you become a follower of Christ you should turn away from "all worldly success and sort of walk around meekly."

"So long as one is doing the work that God wants him to do in the way that God wants him to do it," Colson says, "I tend to agree with John Wesley, who encouraged folks to `make all you can, save all you can, and give away all you can.' "

Likewise, Colson does not believe there is anything inherently wrong with ambition - or with "the desire for significance," as he prefers to call it.

"Ambition is a bad word in some respects," Colson says. "It often has a self-centered, personally-directed connotation. But the desire for significance is part of the image of God - the Imago Dei - that is planted in each of us. It is at the root of every human being."

The key question, Colson says, is whether we will use our talents and skills to feed our own ego and make a name for ourselves, or whether we will choose instead to use these God-given attributes to try to accomplish things that have lasting significance.

But doing the right thing here isn't as easy as it might seem, Colson says. Reflecting once again on his own conversion experience, Colson says that during the throes of Watergate, he was profoundly affected by C.S. Lewis' writings about selfish ambition in Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1958). Colson says, "For the first time, I realized that my intense drive and ambition, my desire to succeed, was driven more by pride than anything else."

Yet Colson says that his decision to follow Christ didn't make him soft. In fact, much like the Apostle Paul (who was a hard-charging, type-A personality before and after his Damascus Road experience), Colson says, "I still have that same drive, that insatiable urge to accomplish things, to make things happen."

But he says that his drive "has been redirected" to serve God and others. Or more precisely, it "is being redirected anew each day" to serve God and others. For Colson is quick to acknowledge that each of us must die daily to selfish ambition if we hope to keep our pride in check.

And he says that each of us must seek to avoid self-deception about our true motives for wanting to accomplish things. "The most insidious part of human nature is our infinite capacity for self-rationalization," Colson says. "As Jeremiah said, `The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.' " (Jeremiah 17:9) And Colson says the challenges here can be particularly great for people like himself whose high-profile good works are widely honored. (For example, several years ago, Colson received the highly acclaimed Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for his work leading Prison Fellowship Ministries.)

Accordingly, Colson says that each of us needs to be enmeshed in an accountability group where other believers can help us weigh our motives and actions. In his case, Colson has a board that "has a full run at me, and I expect them to tell me when I am out of line."

"In addition, I am blessed to have a wife who tells me exactly what she thinks," Colson says. "Sometimes I don't like it at the moment, but I always do afterwards."

Colson says that if we understand the difference between success and significance, we will see that some of the most significant people in the marketplace are folks we don't typically consider successful. For example, Colson says that people studying the 19th century often talk about the enormous influence that Queen Victoria of England enjoyed. And understandably so. But Colson says, "The interesting thing is that when Victoria was a child, she was led to Christ and discipled by her governess - a woman who had been converted by John Wesley. So the real heroine of the Victorian era was as much the governess who led Victoria to Christ as the Queen herself. In man's eyes, the governess was not successful. But in God's eyes, she was very significant."

In considering our world today, Colson says we live in a time very different from the Victorian age. "The loss of truth - the abandonment of moral absolutes - is the most powerful force in the culture today," Colson says. "And this is making it all the more imperative to make [our] witness felt - not just by welcoming people into the church and making them feel at home, but by the visible witness of a life lived differently in the marketplace. People should be able to see something different about us, whether that be at the job, the Rotary Club, the golf club or the PTA meeting."

Or even at the Olympic track. Indeed, one of the best illustrations of the difference between selfish ambition and the quest for significance can be found in the life of Eric Liddell, the 1920s British sprinter celebrated in the motion picture, Chariots of Fire. At one point during his training, Liddell's sister tries to convince him to give up trivial pursuits like running so that he can join her on the mission field in China. But believing that God is interested in all of life, Liddell responds, "Jenny, I believe God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure."

Liddell continues to train, and eventually lands a spot on the British team. But when he gets to the Olympics, he finds that one of the preliminary races for his event (the 100-meter dash) is on a Sunday. Rather than compromise his conviction to avoid competition on Sundays, Liddell chooses to forfeit his opportunity to win Olympic gold.

In the end, of course, Liddell ends up winning a gold medal in the 400-meter race after a fellow countryman, impressed by Liddell's godliness, gives up his place in that race so that Liddell can compete. And while Liddell's gold-medal success makes for a perfect Hollywood ending, the truth is Eric Liddell already had attained the ultimate prize of his track career. For at his moment of testing, Liddell demonstrated that significance isn't ultimately found in winning gold medals - it's found in feeling His pleasure.

Title of article: “The Quest for Significance.” Life@Work Vol. 2, No. 2 – Innovation March/April 1999. Written by William R. Mattox Jr. who is an award-winning writer who serves on the Board of Contributors at USA Today.  lifeatwork.com.  Content distributed by WorkLife.org > used for non-profit teaching purposes only.