Musings on Culture Making

I have been reading through the book Culture Making by Andy Crouch, which was first recommended to me by my friend Josh Gove from his inexhaustible list of textbooks he's reading for Bible college. It caught my attention because I have been prompted to think about the role of my profession and its relationship with my on-going purposeful faith walk.

This is not new. My earliest musings focused on people and how my interactions with them were important in the kingdom of God. When I worked on-site at Intel in Folsom, it was the first time I'd ever worked in a large company environment and the sheer number of individuals that I was involved with was somewhat overwhelming. God showed me how each of the many and varied people I dealt with was important--probably more important than any project I was working on. It was a learning season.

But then there was the work itself. I once jokingly described my work as getting paid to solve elaborate cross-word puzzles. Intricate, absorbing but ultimately just a relatively small number of ones and zeroes plugged into a chip. Not related to people. There were no helpful books like Tim Keller's Every Good Endeavor to walk me through linking the creative and productive aspects of labor with God's divine charter for me. I sort of stumbled into it.

How to create? That is a new question I am ruminating on in my spare cycles. It is not just something unique to the Christian sub-culture in America, which is almost universally defined by (as Crouch puts it) condemning, critiquing, copying or consuming that which is produced by others. In fact, in many fields, creativity is less about pursuing truth and more about rebelling against the status quo. The need for significance often drives us to seek a noticeable separation from what is already out there. That separation from what is seems more important to us than closing the gap with what ought.

Crouch talks about these two positive roles as the artist and the gardener. The search for the undiscovered truth and the cultivation of the discovered. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it and apply it to the mundane chores of writing code and editing specifications. I'll let you know what I find out.