A prayer for a crappy day at work

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face. (John 19:1-3)

God never intended for work to be painful and frustrating. According to Genesis 1 and 2, work was God’s first gift to humankind.

But when sin entered the world, the curse broke every part of creation, including the world of work. God told Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you” (see Genesis 3:17-18).

That backstory makes the Roman soldiers’ choice of a “crown of thorns” for Jesus all the more poetic. Knowingly or not, the Romans used a thorn—this symbol of the curse—to crown the One whose resurrection would overturn that curse. It is precisely because Christ allowed himself to be crowned with thorns that, three days later, we could sing:

No more let sins and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

And Scripture makes clear that Christ’s blessings flow even to our cursed work. In Isaiah’s prophetic vision of the New Earth, he reports God as saying, “See, I will create new heavens and a new earth…my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain” (Isaiah 65:17, 21-23).

No more thorns and thistles. No more painful toil. No more Sunday scaries. No more two-factor authentication. This is work as it was always intended to be and always will be for evermore.

But this is not what we experience today. Until Christ returns and removes these thorns for good, we must learn to work through them in a way that points to the King who wore them. How? Join me in this Prayer for a Crappy Day at Work:

Father God,
You see the thorns that push back against my work,
the futility and painful toil.

I bring my frustrations to you now, not in grumbling to others,
but in honest lament to you,
trusting that you care,
because you would not plan to remove what you do not notice.

Thank you that even these thorns have driven me to your presence.
And your presence, not my productivity, is what I need most.

Jesus, thank you for wearing a crown of thorns,
taking the curse upon yourself
and reversing it at the cross and the empty tomb.
Thank you that the thorns I feel today are real,
but they are not final.

I cling to your promise
that a day is coming when I will
long enjoy the work of my hands,
when there will be no more futile labor,
no more painful toil,
no more thorns pushing back against my work.

Until that day, help me trust you with the thorns,
work faithfully in your ways,
and fix my eyes on the coming restoration
you have already secured.

Amen.