LET YOUR WORK HONOR GOD

“Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”  (1 Corinthians 10:31b NIV)

Journalist William Zinsser’s first job was writing for the Buffalo News. Traditionally cub reporters often start by writing obituaries, but Zinsser was frustrated with his assignment. I could be doing Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporting, he thought to himself, and I’m stuck writing obituaries. Writers don’t win Pulitzers for obituaries. Finally he worked up enough courage and asked his editor, “When am I going to get some decent story assignments?”

“Listen, kid!” his crusty old editor growled at him. “Nothing you write will ever get read as carefully as what you are writing right now. You misspell a word, you mess up a date, and a family will be hurt. But you do justice to somebody’s grandmother, to somebody’s mom, you make a life sing, and they will be grateful forever. They will put your words in laminate.”

Things changed.

“I pledged I would make the extra calls,” Zinsser said. “I would ask the extra questions. I would go the extra mile.”

That is essentially from the Sermon on the Mount -- write obituaries for others as you would want others to write an obituary for you -- obituaries that deserved to be laminated -- because someday, somebody will. Zinsser eventually moved on to other kinds of writing, including a book on writing itself that has sold more than a million copies. But none of it would have happened if he had not devoted himself to obituaries.

-- John Ortberg in “The Me I Want to Be”


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