What A Woodpile and an Audiobook Did to My Faith

How Nancy Pearcey and Some Firewood Changed My View of Work Forever

I grew up in a church that believed God only cared about “spiritual” things—like our hearts, evangelism, and ministry. The practical, earthy parts of life? Just a necessary evil. Work was something we had to do to survive, not something God delighted in. I mean, He cared about our hearts while doing spreadsheets… but the spreadsheets themselves? Meaningless. To understand what happened next, you need to know that I was an awkward homeschooler raised in a Christian cult.

^Photo evidence of me at the time 🙈 One day, I was outside chopping firewood (as one does 😅). The cult taught that women shouldn’t work outside the home or go to college, so here I was in my early 20's with not a lot to do. But I wasn’t content to just bake muffins and wait around for marriage. I wanted to do something important. Even then, God had already planted in me a desperate desire for meaningful work.

So, I decided to start reading theology books. I kept careful track of them in my Goodreads account and read over 100 books a year. Most of them were thick theology books. And I loved it.

That brings me back to the firewood chopping...

That day, I had my headphones on, listening to Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey. I had the physical book open on a stump beside me so I could glance over when the concepts got hard to follow. I’ll never forget it: axe in hand, clunky headphones on, and that book open on the stump. And then came the part that changed everything.

Nancy explained that the divide we have between the “spiritual” stuff God supposedly cares about and the ordinary stuff He doesn’t—that divide doesn’t come from the Bible. It comes from ancient gnostic heresies. Some of the early church fathers and theologians allowed the ideas popular in their time to color their theology, and those ideas are still lurking in our churches today.

I sat down beside the stump and cried.

I had been lied to. My own church had taught me that most of my life—work, dishes, spreadsheets, showering, cleaning my house— it didn’t really matter. They said He cared about my heart while I did those things… but not about the things themselves. And suddenly I saw it clearly: He did care. Deeply. He made a material world on purpose. It wasn’t meaningless. It wasn’t a mistake.

That moment wrecked me—in the best way. And looking back, I know that’s the day my calling blossomed. I wanted every Christian to be free from that lie. I wanted to help them see what I had just seen:

That all of life matters to God.

That our everyday work isn’t a distraction from discipleship—it’s one of the main places we live it out.

And that reclaiming our work as worship changes everything.

Want to experience this transformation in your own work life? Join The Voca Society, a membership designed for Christian women who work in any capacity- at home, in a 9-5, or in their own business or ministry. Come join a community of Christian women like you and transform your view of your work, today!

JOIN THE VOCA SOCIETY

^ Our family's woodpile. Don't worry, We did most of it with a hydraulic wood chopper!