This is an overused word in our society today. Don’t you agree? Love is such a powerful and meaningful word. Yet in the same minute, I could say, “Man, I love pizza.” And then look at my daughter and say, “I love you, Harvest.”

Same word. Different intents. Of course I don’t love pizza as much as I love my baby girl, but I use the same word. Maybe the english language does us a disservice here.

In the Greek language, there are a few different words to describe love…eros, philia, storge and agape.

Agape love centers around sacrificial love and I like its definition best:

“Unconditional love that is always giving and impossible to take or be a taker. It devotes total commitment to seek your highest best no matter how anyone may respond. This form of love is totally selfless and does not change whether the love given is returned or not.”

So why is love one of our core values? I think first and foremost because we really feel a sacrificial love for our work. Kind of like the story of the yellow leaf, we also exist to sacrificially serve.

Secondly, as believers we view our work as worship. To us, there is no spiritual | secular divide. It’s all spiritual. So if our work is worship, then our work is directly related and connected to our relationship with God.

In her Why Work essay, Dorothy Sayers puts it this way:

“Where we have become confused is in mixing up the ends to which our work is put with the way in which the work is done. The end of the work will be decided by our religious outlook: as we are so we make. It is the business of religion to make us Christian people, and then our work will naturally be turned to Christian ends, because our work is the expression of ourselves…Or perhaps we may put it more shortly still: If work is to find its right place in the world, it is the duty of the Church to see to it that the work serves God, and that the worker serves the work.”

Did you catch that? A Christian’s work should naturally result in Christian ends — Worship. The work, if done as worship, will serve God. Therefore, according to Sayers, it is the duty of the worker to “serve the work.” She also says that “to serve the work is a labor of pure love.”

We strive to love God through our work at Yellow Leaf. If we only focus on pleasing our clients or pleasing the community, we will falsify our work, like we talked about in our recent Authenticity post. If we view our work as a labor of pure love — love of God — then we are freed up to do incredible work for His glory.

To our clients, yes we love YOU and we love working FOR you. But we have made love a core value of our business, because it’s to that end — the love of God — that we work.

This also has deep implications in our relationships with each other and with our clients and we’ll take more about this in an upcoming post later this week called, “Relationship Really Matter.”

Today’s 8×10 Word Art: LOVE