What does filter mean? I have heard this word used to refer to pictures and posts long before I actually thought about what it meant.
Classically, a filter was a noun- something you placed on a collecting substance that was porous- something that would remove the impurities and particles from the liquid that you poured through it. All the unwanted parts could be easily thrown away, and you were left with something beautiful and pure.
When I thought of it this way, I loved pairing up the word “filter‘ with the workplace. You could think of the Bible as weeding out the selfish, the confused, the unloving, and the frustrating parts of our world and leaving us with something pure and beautiful to work with. That would sometimes weed out the things we despised in our workplace and leave us with incredible opportunity to engineer and plan and create from there. We spend far too much of our time working as if the world was created by those in charge, when really, it was created by God. But when we leave it up to those who don’t understand the way it was meant to progress- when we leave it unfiltered- we miss part of the joy and possibilities that exist there as well.
However, the newer definition of filter is even more interesting to me. “Filter“ is now thought of as a verb, and it indicates that a computed or digital product was changed. it means you can apply a certain lighting or texture or hue that wasn’t there in reality and make something look incredible. It also literally means you can change something to look unlike reality– to be more polished, more beautiful, more unblemished then the original. It’s a way to create amazing new possibilities but also has power to simply gloss over and hide imperfections.
And I love applying that to my job. Just like with our real lives- we can change the simplest of things into either a positive or a negative depending on how we use them. Water, for instance, is obviously not an evil substance, but even if you drink gallons of it, you will have negative consequences. And in the same way, the work we do must be filtered correctly and purposely. The world has seen enough of filtered, perfected fakeness, and craves to see something which is beautiful and yet real. How exactly that will turn out in your life is up to you:
- Will we filter out God and hide? Pretend that we do not have a relationship with Him? Leave Him in the church building, completely unwelcome and unrelated to the job we do everyday?
- Will we filter out the truth? Put on happy, fake smiles, and pretend we are perfect and demand that everyone around us look that way too? Covering up anything that has not been overly processed and left without unique ingenuity?
- Will we filter our words? Will we bite out tongues even when provoked and only respond in love? Will we trust God to show us when to fight and when to let it go? Will we only be judgmental, harsh, and condescending?
- Will we filter out the impurities? Remove the parts that are not of God and ask Him to step in and show us a better way than it’s been done in the past?
- Will we learn to properly filter and unfilter our lives and apply that to the jobs we have been given to do each day?
What will the term “work unfiltered” look like for you?