Publisher Description

The workplace has become increasingly complex to manage in recent years. For both supervisors and employees, differences in experience, personalities, and background often make it difficult for them to coexist. The workplace is a source of chronic stress for many, causing negative outcomes such as absenteeism, low productivity, sexual harassment, and workplace violence to name a few. Unfortunately, the woes of the workplace have become so common that many people feel helpless and hopeless and do not know how to handle workplace issues. In particular, many Christians do not know how to cope with workplace problems because they do not know how to deal with these issues from a faith-based perspective. To better understand the intricacies of the workplace, it is first important to understand why God has ordered us to work in the first place. Healing in the Workplace: A Spiritual Guide to Coping with Work Issues provides the long-awaited answers to solving work conflict and problems, helping us to see why God wants us to work, and how we are supposed to treat one another at work.

Excerpt from Book

WORK LIFE BALANCE Work-Life Balance is the unique idea of stabilizing one's career and lifestyle. Some of the things that must be balanced between career and lifestyle are one's ambition to obtain more wages or a higher ranked position at work meanwhile desiring more quality time with family and friends, and maintaining physical, mental, and spiritual health. Balancing work and life, by all intents and purposes is not easy since many people have found themselves in a conflict between their work aspirations and personal life. When there is conflict between the two, a multitude of problems can occur. Some of these problems include a break down in physical health with stress being a contributing factor to high blood pressure and other cardiovascular diseases, and the emergence of anger, anxiety, and depression deteriorating one's mental health. More importantly, once these problems arise as a result of an imbalance in work and personal life, the spiritual man is gravely impacted and compromised. In fact, one of the consequences of ineffective work-life balance is the weakening of the relationship with God. Imagine working a job in which you compromise going to church and being fed with God's word to do overtime. You may initially justify this by telling yourself that you give tithes and offerings to your church and by acquiring more money would allow you to continue to give more tithes and offerings. You may even talk yourself into believing that watching Sunday morning church services on television before you go to work is suffice. However, you have failed to remember that God expects us to fellowship with others in the body of Christ. If this pattern of choosing work over your personal relationship with God continues, you may find that it becomes more difficult to hear God and once this happens, a vicious cycle is likely take place. If it becomes harder and harder to hear God because we have neglected our relationship with Him and have put other things before Him, we are likely to become angry with Him and stop seeking His face. Our spiritual lives are all about balance and maintaining stability. When there is a rift in how we balance our work and the quality of life and the things that keeps us happy and healthy, we are out of order with God's will for our lives. Surely, God wants us to be prosperous, successful, and hard workers. In fact, the Bible says in several passages that Jesus and God worked. John 5:17 states that Jesus answered the sick man at the Pool of Bethseda: My Father has been working until now, and I have been working. This suggests that God expects us to work since we are created in His likeness. However, the Bible does not indicate that we must work at the expense of maintaining healthy physical bodies and certainly not at the expense of our relationship with Him. Issues in work-life balance can come in many different forms. Some people place higher emphasis on leisure and neglect their obligations to their jobs while others value their work duties more than their quality of life. The reality is that work-life balance is a concept that has been examined and analyzed for decades and with the way that the economy has shifted in recent years, it is fair to say that work-life balance will be an ongoing issue to come.

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