Faith At Work: How I Learned To Love The Thing I Loathed

There’s always one thing in every job that grates on you. Maybe for you it’s the paperwork. The emails. The early mornings.

For me? It’s the meetings.

Let me just say it plain: I’ve never had a job—not one—no matter how perfect or purpose-filled, that didn’t come with something I absolutely loathed. And for me, meetings top the list. You know the phrase: This meeting could’ve been an email. At this point, I’m convinced most of them could’ve been a line in a group chat.

Especially now, in this post-COVID world, where “Let’s meet” has become the default answer to everything. Folks don’t even think twice—“Let’s hop on a call” is the new “I’ll swing by your desk.” But truth be told, most of these meetings? Completely unnecessary.

And listen, I’m not just saying this off the cuff. You know I do my research—because that’s who I am. Harvard Business Review even says meetings should ideally last 30 minutes. A full hour at most. Why? Because our attention spans tap out somewhere between 10 and 18 minutes. We zone out. We stop listening. We lose the very purpose we gathered for.

So yeah. Meetings had me feeling drained and frustrated. Until something shifted.

I’ve been working with a nurse coach—a fellow RN who’s becoming certified in coaching. She’s not flashy. Not razzle-dazzle. She’s not me. And at first, that rubbed me the wrong way. But God—being God—used her to give me exactly what I needed.

In just two sessions—one long, one short—she said something that struck a chord.

“What can you actually control?”

I blinked. “What you mean?”

She gently repeated, “I think you need to shift your focus to what you can control, instead of what you can’t.”

Whew. That thing landed. Because I had just said those exact words to a student. I had just reminded someone else that what we focus on grows. And there I was—spending my energy dreading meetings. Resenting how they stole my time.

But while I was praying about it, writing it out, God whispered a deeper truth:

Not a single thing is wasted.

The meetings weren’t wasting my time—I was. I had been squandering the opportunity to love, to connect, to lead. Not because the space wasn’t there, but because I wasn’t showing up in it fully.

And that’s when the shift happened.

I made a decision—an internal agreement with God and myself—to turn painful meetings into purposeful moments. To stop counting the minutes and start noticing the people.

Now, I see it differently.

I get to connect with the students I serve. I get to smile, wave, laugh a little. I get to sit with my coworkers—my fellow laborers—and choose grace. I get to model the energy I want to feel in the room. No more rolling my eyes or sighing through the hour. I’ll show up with intention.

With grace. With kindness.

Because… I have to be there.

And here’s the wild part—the very next day, I felt the shift.

I went from feeling unsure—feeling like I wasn’t doing enough—to being laser-focused. Energized. Getting ish done.

That same day, a meeting I had been dreading—a full hour-long one that I just knews (yes, knews!) really only needed 30 minutes—got rescheduled. And when it finally happened? It was just 30 minutes.

God heard me and answered.

And, I showed up more myself. I led with humor, with clarity. I didn’t just meet expectations—I exceeded them. My director wanted to make sure I understood the findings from an audit. Not only did I understand them, I gave him a full play-by-play on each corrective step we’d already taken and the upcoming actions we were going to take.

I don’t know if he was blown away… But I was!

Because in that moment, I realized—I’m doing a much better job than I’ve been giving myself credit for. I’m offering more than they’re even asking for. I’m seeing what needs to be done and doing it with love, with intention, and for the good of the phenomenal students we serve. And for my staff—who I serve, too.

A Prayer for Purposeful Presence

God,
Help us shift—our minds, our hearts, our focus—so that they align fully with Your will, not our own.
Teach us to release what we cannot control and to steward what we can with grace and love.
Remind us that nothing is wasted when it’s placed in Your hands.
Even the tasks we dread can become sacred when we meet them with You.
Let Your will be done—because it is wiser, greater, and far more beautiful than anything we could design.

And we end with the Serenity Prayer: Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
The courage to change the things we can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

You said when we ask You for wisdom you give it to us freely. Give us wisdom God. Overwhelm us with wisdom to be who and how you created us to be. And so it is. It is done. It is well. It is already done well. Amen.