When Work Becomes Worship Again: Flow, Awe, and the Attunement of Love
Finding our way back through abiding in Christ
Before the Fracture
Before the world fractured, life moved like music. Work was worship. Effort felt like joy. There was no restless voice asking, How do I look? How am I doing?
Genesis says:
“The man and his wife were both naked and felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25).
That’s more than physical. It’s a picture of undivided presence—no anxious self turned inward, no hiding, no comparison.
Then came the rupture. Eyes that once gazed outward in trust turned inward in fear. They saw themselves and hid. Attention splintered. Labor became toil. We began living under the heavy gaze of self-consciousness.
And yet, something in us remembers. That’s why moments of complete absorption—a song, a painting, a project, a prayer—feel like home. Psychologists call this flow. Scripture calls it something deeper: abiding.
When Time Disappears
Have you ever looked up and realized an hour felt like five minutes? Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called this flow: a state where action and awareness merge, distractions fade, and joy rises from the act itself.
In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), Csíkszentmihályi identified eight characteristics of this state:
Complete concentration
Clarity of goals
Transformation of time
Intrinsic reward
Effortlessness
Balance between challenge and skill
Merging action and awareness
Loss of self-consciousness
Read that list again. Loss of self-consciousness sounds like the reverse of Genesis 3—where shame turned eyes inward. And clarity of goals, merging action and awareness echo Jesus’ words:
“My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me” (John 4:34).
Flow feels like home because it whispers of a world without fracture—where presence was whole, love was unselfconscious, and work was worship.
When Music Speaks of Home
Two songs have always carried that ache for me, the sense of finding home not in a place but in a presence.
Billy Joel captured it in You’re My Home:
“Well, I’ll never be a stranger and I’ll never be alone, whenever we’re together that’s my home.”
Glen Campbell (through John Hartford’s lyric) sang it in Gentle on My Mind:
“It’s knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk.”
Why do these lines resonate so deeply? Because they hint at what Jesus offers:
“Make your home in Me.”
A love that doesn’t shut the door. A home that can’t be lost.
Jazz and the Sound of Flow
I’ve always loved jazz—not just the sound, but the way it works. There’s structure, but there’s freedom. A drummer sets the time, the bass keeps the groove, and then the trumpet steps out—pure improvisation, alive in the moment. The pianist riffs back, the sax joins in, and for a while it feels like the music is playing itself.
Each instrument speaks its individuality, then returns to the center. Tension and release. Order and surprise. Unity and diversity in harmony.
That’s flow. And maybe that’s why jazz has always felt sacred to me. It isn’t chaos; it’s ordered freedom. In some mysterious way, it echoes what life was meant to be: individuality fully alive, rooted in communion. Freedom and order—together.
Avodah: Where Work and Worship Meet
The Hebrew word for work is ʿavodah—a word that also means worship. In Eden, there was no gap between labor and liturgy. When we experience flow—even in ordinary work—we glimpse that original harmony: effort and joy fused into one reality.
As Tim Keller wrote in Every Good Endeavor:
“Work was not a necessary evil that came into the world after sin. It was part of God’s perfect design for human life because we were made in God’s image, and God is a worker.”
Work was never the curse. Toil was. The fracture turned worship into worry and service into self-conscious striving.
Awe and Attunement
Abraham Joshua Heschel called the heart of spirituality radical amazement. Awe and flow share a family resemblance: in both, we lose the tyranny of the clock and the weight of ego. But awe lifts flow beyond the horizontal—it turns attention toward Presence, the God in whom all harmony begins.
The Safety to Improvise
Neuroscience tells us flow requires safety. When we feel secure, creativity flourishes. When we live loved, we risk, improvise, and engage deeply. James Wilder puts it simply:
“Joy is when someone is glad to be with me.”
Spiritually, this is what Jesus offers:
“Abide in Me, and I in you… As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.” (John 15:4)
Abiding is the ultimate condition for life to flow—because perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).
How Jesus Embodied Divine Flow
Undistracted Presence — He saw people fully: Zacchaeus in a tree (Luke 19), a Samaritan woman (John 4), children on the margins.
Anchored Purpose — “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me” (John 4:34).
Redeemed Time — He lingered with children, dined with sinners, prayed before dawn (Mark 1:35).
Joy as Engine — “For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).
Unforced Rhythm — “My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11:30).
Oneness with the Father — “The Son can do nothing by Himself” (John 5:19).
Dallas Willard called this life:
“Effortless obedience to Christ.” (The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 100)
Flow and Fruit: Two Visions of Wholeness
Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23:
“Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
Flow is psychological integration—our faculties moving in harmony.
The Fruit is spiritual integration—the Spirit bringing harmony between us and God, others, and ourselves.
Flow whispers of Eden. The Fruit signals the restoration of that unity through abiding in Christ. And while flow fades when conditions change, the Fruit remains—because its source is the Vine.
The Final Note
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi gave us language for something we already knew: the deepest joy isn’t in passive pleasure, but in absorbed, meaningful engagement.
Flow, at its best, is like a jazz solo in the great composition of life. But the music isn’t ours alone. Jesus invites us into His song, His rhythm, His joy.
Because the goal is not just to “get in the zone.”
It’s to abide in Him.
“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)