Does war trivialize what we do?

What are we doing here?

Photo taken by Mahmoud Sulamain on Unsplash

For many, myself included, the news flashes again and again past the digital sprawl.

Perhaps the recent coverage of bombings and retaliation in the Middle East has crept past the noise and gathered your attention for a few minutes.

The violence persists. Even just today, our daily standup with our product team was overshadowed by fighter jets screeching overhead in the background of one of our team members. Such warfare, violence and hate seems like it relativizes a product daily standup.

Above you'll see the skyline behind one of our team members

How do we go about deciding whether a button should go over here or over there or whether the page should be called "Donate" or "Give" when the problems of our world are so large? How can we work on a UX flows and tracking work tickets when schools, convoys, and city streets burn? Why aren't all of us hopping aboard the next plane to the Middle East to proclaim the Gospel to those who may, in a red glare and flash, perish in the conflict?

The great and prophetic writer, CS Lewis asked this very question under the looming death of World War II. In a sermon he preached in 1939, he stated:

What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Of course, Lewis was preaching to students at university. The placid occupations he refers to here are things like studying, homework, and lectures. Having fought in the Great War himself, Lewis knows the graveness of war and the contrast to university life. Yet his question remains true for those of us building product at Switchboard. He twists the question even more acutely:

[A person] must ask himself how it is right … for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology?

I might add to that list the trivialities of product design and development. We should shut down our product work and cast ourselves into the crossfire, right?

The dignity of being ordinary

We must not conflate grave circumstances with the moral call for us to be the savior within the plight. Lewis explains that such times and conflicts as these ought not absorb our whole attention, not because they are unimportant but precisely because we are made for more than any one conflict, nation, or political cause. Our religious life and vocation does, in some sense occupy the whole of our life. God's call for us is total. "Yet, in spite of this it is clear that Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities," writes Lewis. This includes the great span of human creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. I encounter such tangible creativity among our product team every day. Our work is ordinary. And praise God that it is so.

Hear Lewis on this:

All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is a rather a new organization which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.

Our work is not trivial

For whatever reason, in the Divine wisdom and foreknowledge of God, he called together the mission, funding, technology, and people on the Switchboard product team to create a platform where Believers from all over God's church can connect with each other. We cannot stop a missile. We cannot douse the flames on that office building.

We can make that button easier to find or that query a bit more performant. And yet, in the ordinary content of that work, we know that "Whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him" (2 Cor 5:9). 

We pray that the Prince of Shalom would establish his covenant of Shalom among all people. We long with all the Church for those leaves which are for the healing of the nations. 

And in the meanwhile, we will build product for Jesus. We are not building heaven on earth or some utopia. We are building a network of relationships that together proclaim the gospel of the Kingdom. 

So, if you'll allow me, I will conclude with a light paraphrase of these closing words from Lewis:

But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of building product (building product added), humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think so still.

And the same can be said of you and your ordinary and natural activities. Care for your children. Sit on the phone with the IRS for hours. Go to that coffee meeting. Write that next social media post. Your ordinary is pleasing to your Father in Heaven.

Pray for the safety of our team and for all the Believers who are a part of the Switchboard network who currently are at-risk or in danger.