Frustration in the work place

Dear Pastor Lawyer,

I work in a high stress job situation made worse by a co-worker who seems to be constantly at me. It seems that I can never do anything right and he picks on me whenever he gets the chance. I don’t know what to do and was wondering if you could help.

Frustrated

Dear Frustrated,

It would probably be safe to say that all of us have been in your situation. The Bible has a lot to say about what to do in your predicament. For example, in Matthew 5:44 Jesus said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Among other things, what Jesus was saying is that we need to love our co-workers actively. (Your co-worker can’t be worse than an enemy, can he?) This means you need to go out of your way to do and be what your co-worker requires you to be, even before he asks you. When you come to work in the morning, you need to say, “Good morning” to him and mean it. Bring him coffee and cookies (not a good idea if he’s dieting). Ask him about his family and bring cards for the kids on their birthday. If you know what he expects and can anticipate how you are going to be criticized, beat him to the punch by apologizing for the mistake or by doing whatever it is you know he is going to want you to do — long before he asks. Jesus said, “Love them, bless them, do good to them.”

The second thing Jesus said to do for him is to pray for him. In your praying you need to say to God exactly what you think and mean. But if your praying is less than loving, you need to keep at it until being in God’s presence softens your heart. As you stay on your knees, lifting your co-worker up to Him, your prayers will slowly change from, “Get him, Lord” to “Save him, Lord” or “Bless him, Lord.” That’s the kind of praying Jesus had in mind.

Before going, I thought I ought to mention that Jesus didn’t, nor does the Bible in general, tell us what outcome we ought to expect by loving our enemies. In my experience I’ve seen two kinds of reactions. One, and this is very rare, the co-worker gets even more antagonistic. If this occurs, stick with it. God is working in both your lives to bring Himself glory. (You might never see or understand what He’s doing.) The other reaction, which is far more common, is that both of you soften up and see that you can work together as a team. You will come to realize that your co-worker isn’t the terrible person you think he is now. You might see that he has a life outside of the office and that those concerns have leached their way into the work place. At the very least, you’ll see that your co-worker is a real person after all and that your perception was right about his picking on you, but now that you are aggressively loving him, he has changed and you are actually getting along and liking each other.

I hope this helps,

Pastor Lawyer