Stop Trying to be More Happy than Happy

Rethinking Work, Vocation, and Sacred Routines of Ordinary Life

I met a saint in a nursing home this week. She never had a career. She couldn’t hold a full-time job because she suffered from seizures and learning disabilities all her life. But for twenty years, she scrubbed floors and chair legs in fast food restaurants. She lit up when she talked about it. “You won’t get rich working fast food,” she said. “You need thick skin, and friends are hard to keep. But I did my job. I cleaned everything, even the legs of the chairs. My manager would try to stop me saying I didn't need to do all that. But I wanted it to be right.”

She misses that work. Grieves for it even. She misses it like a calling. And in her voice I heard something holy—something rare. Not bitterness for what she didn’t get to do in life. Not a complaint about being overlooked. But reverence. Purpose. Pride.

In a world where so many of us dream of escaping our jobs, or feel as though our work is beneath us or not good enough, she longed to return to hers, not because of the pay or the prestige, but because it made her feel useful. Human. Alive.

Her words made me think of the old monastic motto: ora et labora — pray and work. The idea that work itself can be a form of prayer. That labor, even when unnoticed or unglamorous, even when it isn’t a stepping stone to something greater, is still sacred.

Coincidentally, I started reading "Where God Happens" by Bishop Rowan Williams this week. It is a book exploring the sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. This woman’s story reminded me of what the people of the desert understood. These early Christian monks fled into the wilderness not to avoid work, but to sanctify it. They braided baskets and wove mats. They fetched water and baked bread. They believed that manual labor grounded the soul, restrained the ego, and offered a path to holiness. Work was not a distraction from God; it was a meeting place.

Evagrius Ponticus, a Christian monk and mystic who lived in the Nitrian Desert in Egypt crica 350 CE, warned against acedia, a spiritual restlessness that often creeps in under the disguise of laziness or contempt for ordinary life. And the remedy wasn’t more time in the clouds but more time with your hands in the earth. More silence. More sweeping. More stillness in motion. The monks weren’t just working; they were praying with their bodies.

In our time, acedia often takes on a more modern mask—not laziness, but a subtle contempt for ordinary life, a restless urge to escape the quiet dignity of the everyday. We live in a time when many are chasing not just happiness, but a hypercharged version of it: constant stimulation, novelty, emotional peaks. I once heard someone say, “Don’t try to be more happy than happy.” That became a personal pursuit of mine. Because when we demand more from life than life can sustainably give, when we expect every moment to thrill, every day to inspire, we train our hearts to resent the quiet, faithful, unremarkable beauty of ordinary existence.

It’s no wonder that so many in our time turn to drugs or dopamine-chasing distractions. If we believe that life without pleasure is meaningless, then of course work becomes the enemy. But when we burn out the pleasure centers of our brain, we lose our capacity to find joy in simple things. And when everything else is stripped away, it’s those simple things—scrubbing chair legs, holding a hand, folding laundry—that remain. They are what endure after the highs have faded, and learning to love them now may be the closest thing we have to a truly happy life.
The early church and monastic movements knew the value of these ordinary rhythms.

St. Benedict of Nursia, a 6th-century monk often considered the father of Western monasticism, believed that daily rhythms of prayer and labor were essential to spiritual life. In the Rule of St. Benedict, work is not simply an economic necessity; it is a spiritual discipline. "Idleness is the enemy of the soul," Benedict wrote. Monks were to divide their days between prayer, study, and labor—because the soul needs all three. And the work, whether it was gardening or washing dishes or copying manuscripts, was to be done as unto the Lord. With care. With devotion. With presence.

Fast forward a thousand years to the Protestant Reformation, and you find Martin Luther expanding this theology of work even further. Luther rejected the idea that only priests and monks had vocations. He taught that all honest work is sacred—that God is at work in the world through bakers and cobblers and farmers and midwives. He declared that changing a diaper could be as holy as celebrating the Eucharist, because vocation isn’t about religious status. It’s about loving your neighbor through the work of your hands.

“Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason… takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, ‘Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench… ?’ What then does the Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels.”

“God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling—not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.”

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 45: The Christian in Society II

And here’s where the conversation with the woman in the nursing home becomes so theologically subversive: she didn’t just work a job. She fulfilled a vocation. She embodied a spiritual truth that our culture is too distracted and status-obsessed to notice. She poured herself out in a job most people look down on, and she did it with care, with joy, and with a desire to contribute.

We live in a culture that measures work by its rewards—by the size of the paycheck, the prestige of the position, or how well it aligns with our "passions." But what if work is not primarily about getting something, but about giving something? What if its deepest value isn’t in what it produces, but in what it forms in us?

Vocation is not the same as employment. Vocation is not the title on your business card or the upward trajectory of your LinkedIn profile. Vocation is the intersection of who you are and how you love. It is the unique way your life blesses the world, whether or not anyone notices.

This woman’s story also raises uncomfortable questions for those of us who equate purpose with platform. She had no followers. No personal brand. No legacy project. But she was faithful. And her joy in recounting her work—and her sorrow in not being able to do it anymore—bears witness to the fact that something more eternal was happening in those fast food booths than most of us would guess.

It makes me think of Jesus washing feet. Of Paul making tents. Of the anonymous laborers in the early church who opened their homes and gave their time and never made the history books. The Kingdom of God is not built by CEOs and celebrities. It’s built by people who show up. People who scrub chair legs because it matters. People who do their jobs like it’s an offering.

And for those who can no longer work—the disabled, the elderly, the unemployed—there is still a vocation. Still a way of being in the world that matters. Sometimes, the greatest work we do is bearing witness. Naming the good. Sharing the stories. Holding the sacred memory of labor done in love. That’s what this woman did for me. She turned her story into a sermon.

In Genesis, God creates humanity and immediately gives them work to do: tend the garden. Steward the world. Work wasn’t a curse; it was a commission. A way of participating in God’s creative and sustaining activity. Sin distorted it, but it didn’t erase its goodness. And in Christ, even our labor is redeemed. Even our most menial tasks can be transfigured.

So here’s what I want to say to you, whether you love your job or hate it, whether you’re climbing the ladder or cleaning the floor beneath it:

Your work matters.

Not because of how much you make. Not because of what it gets you. But because of what it gives. Because of who it serves. Because of how it shapes you into a person more capable of love.

And if you’re searching for your calling, maybe you don’t need a new title. Maybe you just need to look at your hands. What are they already doing in love? Where is God already using you to hold the world together?

The woman in the nursing home may not know it, but she preached a better sermon than I could. She taught me that labor is love in motion. That dignity is not found in the kind of work we do but in the care with which we do it. And that sometimes, the most spiritual thing we can do is scrub the chair legs—and mean it.