Demotivators

“Just because you’re necessary doesn’t mean you’re important.”

“Give up: At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser.”

Jennifer, a mid-level manager, working 75 hours a week to finish a project, and worried that her division might be shut down, found some posters with these sentiments and made copies for her co-workers. “People really seemed to appreciate it, I have to say,” she recalls.

The poster was one of many Demotivator products sold by Despair, Inc., a company in Austin, TX. Despite the economic turndown, or perhaps because of it, Despair, Inc.’s sales climbed to $4.5 billion last year. *

* * *

In today’s economy, the harder you work, the less you make and the more likely you are to be laid off, or so it seems. It’s easy to lose hope. It’s easy to despair. It’s easy to feel like a loser, like someone who is unimportant.

But God says that you are important.

In The Upper Room Disciplines, Paul Chilcote writes, “I spent Holy Week 1999 in Lithuania. For half a century the church bells and songs fell silent as the church went underground. But then the Spirit descended with healing in its wings … The elderly, especially women, and young children figured prominantly in its rebirth … I remember one elderly grandmother lovingly ask each child, ‘And what is it that you wish to share with the people of God? You see: here, everyone is important.’”

The devotional was based on this scripture:

I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit. Acts 2:17-18.

Young and old, men and women, slaves and free — all are important in the Kingdom of God.

What can we do to motivate, rather than “demotivate” the young and old, men and women, enslaved and free?

Additinally, what can we Christian do to speak the truth in love to the injustice of our present system — the super-rich get filthy rich while the middle and lower income folks work harder, make less, and get fired? Perhaps it’s time for Someone to “put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble.”

And what about Jennifer? Her office was shut down after her project was completed.

* from “Empowering by Disempowerment,” by Ron Walker, New York Times Magazine, April 27, 2008.