The Good News of the Cubicle?

The Good News of the cubicle?

Yes. You read that correctly there is Good News to be found in, around, and with cubicles. And let me also say there is a hell there or as Peter from the movie Office Space so eloquently reminded us:

Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements.

So there's tension.

Cubicles mean work, and work often means frustration and struggle.  Many of us whether we like it or not find our meaning and purpose through our vocation - even using language of calling.  All of which make attempting to find the Good News in cubicles extremely difficult.

So we gravitate to understanding these spaces through that lens but for today, I would like to challenge you take a step to the side and rethink this geometrically focused workspace.

I challenge you to see cubical world has one unit - yes, made up of many different and yet equally important parts.  Each work in specific and unique ways, that independently might accomplish some thing but it is only in working together that true lasting change might occur.

This illustration might help: Maybe you're in the marketing department, you develop a stellar new advertising campaign to launch that will revitalize a product that has grown stale.  After your pitch gets the approval of your supervisor, they then mobilize the sales department to who then begins to contact all the outside reps, clients, and retail outlets on how they will be able to leverage this new strategy.  HR is then notified and projects that the workforce will need to be shifted to accommodate appropriately this change. Now let's not also forget those who are actually manufacturing the product, who by their hard work are actually making it possible for the product to be sold.

Yes, this illustration is oversimplified BUT done so in hopes that we might recognize that there is always something larger going on - and some times we must remember that though we struggle to understand and appreciate those in the cubicle beside us, we need them and they need us.

Even if we do not find ourselves in cubicle world - I have yet to find any profession or experience that allows an individual to thrive over that of a group or community in the long term.

In an age of individualism - we need one another.  We are dependent on one another.

Paul speaks to this and the importance of each part in 1 Corinthians 12:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

From the very beginning, our Creator recognized our need for others. So as you look out on your workspace may it remind you of that need - that you need those who are around you and that they need you - and that is Good News.