Get a life: work life conflicts corrode our soul. Isn't there "something more?".

In my first 20 years of motherhood, I tried every trick in the book. I worked full time as an English professor. I was home full time as the flummoxed mother of twin newborns and a child barely 2 years old. Later, as a writer and editor, I tried every arrangement from part-time to overtime. I worked from a home office; I worked in a "real" office; I worked on a lapboard in the car at the sidelines of soccer practice.

There were good times and there were bad times, but there was never any time I'd label "happily ever after." As far as I can see, there is no one best way to balance earning a living with having a life.

Furthermore, every option I tried succeeded or failed in its own way. The success of what succeeded--and the failure of what failed--were visibly rooted in the quirky variables of my own household. They reflected the kinds of stress I can cope with and the kinds of stress that drive me crazy, what we could do without as a family and what proved essential.

Worse yet, even good solutions did not last. Like all kids, ours were on a relentless, helter-skelter developmental path: What they needed from us kept changing. We seemed to be endlessly coping with something unexpected, with some crisis large or small. Such predictable unpredictability is what physicists call chaos. Up close and firsthand, it can wear a woman down.

Bit by bit, I realized that the "ordinary week" is a rare and no doubt endangered creature, as elusive as the Loch Ness Monster or the Abominable Snowman. People glimpse one from time to time, but only through fog or after too much to drink. There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that I dearly love: The father, sitting up in bed at night, thinking aloud to his wife, observes that if he had known that adults were simply ad-libbing their parts, he would not have been in such a hurry to grow up.

Sooner or later we all realize that adulthood is an ad-lib routine. It's an endless improv exercise. We are not exactly faking it, but neither is life a settled script with an unchanging cast of characters and a single well-unified plot. Nonetheless, when screwball week followed screwball week, I certainly felt at times that I was just faking it. I'm a highly-trained rationalist sort--I wanted my life to make sense. At the core of my struggles was some black hole of incoherence. Something just didn't add up, but I was too busy to figure out what it was.

In the middle of the night, however, I would sometimes lie awake listening to the furnace cycle on and off, listening to my husband breathing. I would wonder why ordinary life sometimes felt like more than I could manage. I work hard; by all accounts I'm as capable as anyone else. "Kids plus careers is craziness," I thought. I felt trapped inside a formula whose only solution was insanity. Would my "room of one's own" turn into a padded cell?

The more I tried to do it all--to keep my career moving, to pay attention to the kids, to enjoy my friends and extended family, to take time for the new neighbors or the elderly couple next door--the harder I tried simply to be a decent human being in all of life's activities and relationships--the more I found myself at odds with myself. On bad days or dark nights, life felt like a zero-sum game that's final outcome was failure.

This seemed to me quite unreasonable. The whole time I was growing up, after all, 1 believed it was possible to do what I ought to do. If I was supposed to make my bed and practice my spelling list and set the table for dinner, that's because it was possible for me not only to do each of these things but also to do all of them--every day.

Alas, adult life is more complicated than that. Adults are always being handed responsibilities without commensurate power, authority, or insight. Becoming an adult and a mother would have been a whole lot easier if, at the same time, I had become a god. But that's not how it works. Instead I learned--as we all learn--that to be human is to be mistake-prone and caught within the inescapable limits of time and energy. We can't do it all. We can't even come close. And it's dangerous--or at least quite depressing--to think otherwise.

What that means, I propose, is that the conflict between life and work is a spiritual predicament. Work-life conflict is probably the spiritual predicament of American culture in a global economy: It matters for everyone who wants more from life than a paycheck. Coping with work-life conflict brings us face to face with the big questions that define the core of anyone's spiritual orientation.

These are the questions that haunt us when tragedy strikes, when problems overwhelm us, when we find ourselves hopelessly wide awake in the middle of the night. What does it mean to be human? Does life--your life, my life--have purpose and meaning? Or are we merely the by-products of DNA seeking molecular im mortality? When push comes to shove, what matters most in life? And why? Whom do you trust, for whom do you care, for what will you sacrifice? To whom or what, if anything, are you accountable for the decisions that you make? These are the central questions of a life lived in good conscience.

Work-life conflicts corrode our souls because our cultural moment is shaped by utterly inhuman answers to the questions that conscience asks. The "spirituality" of the 24/7 global marketplace goes like this:

   He who dies with the most toys wins.
   Look out for #1.
   Nobody gives a damn: Remember that!
   Get the most, give the least.
   The bottom line is the top priority.

No wonder work-life questions drive us crazy. There is no other sane response. As theologian Sallie McFague writes in her book Life Abundant (Augsburg Fortress), "Market ideology has become our way of life, almost our religion, telling us who we are (consumers) and what is the goal of life (making money)." We are besieged on all sides by cultural pressures insisting that the good life rests upon earning and spending, as if the great commandment were "Compete, Consume, and Die."

For decades now, women have argued that we need "something more" than repetitive rounds of housework. But more recently people who study business culture have begun to argue that many employed people also yearn for "something more" than the endless, exhausting routine of paid work and ruthless competition. All of us need work to do that provides both an engaging challenge and something worth doing for its own sake.

But there is much more at stake here than simple boredom or commonplace physical weariness. Behind the unsatisfied quest for "something more," for soul-worthy work, there is the deep human need to contribute to the common good. We need to know that the work we do matters in the larger scheme of things. We need to know that our lives contribute to making the world a better place, even if we are simply cleaning the house or reconciling invoices, not teaching children to read or discovering a cure for cancer.

The image of God is deep in our souls, and inevitably we yearn for that reality to be visible in our lives--incarnate again, through us, within the mundane details of an ordinary week in an ordinary life. With God's grace, even the ordinary is made holy.

Our yearning for "something more" reflects this need to be compassionate, not simply competitive. Compassion both arises from and strengthens that fiery spark of the holy one dwelling in each of us. Love of neighbor strengthens love of God and--paradoxically--a spiritually mature self-love as well. It does so because the love that is God is pure grace.

Such love is not earned, and so we don't have to worry about earning it. We are freed at last from anxious self-absorption and the fear that our best efforts will prove inadequate in the end. When we do the best we can at a challenging task and yet we do so without anxiety about our performance, our actions are at some deep level effortless. They are not constrained by ego. The absence of such constraint is part of what we mean by "graceful."

God simply calls us to be our deepest, truest selves. God does so without threat and without coercion. At the very depths of our deepest selves, there is the indelible image of God. The imago Dei can be obscured by pain, by history, by fear, by failure, by the blind demands of human egotism. But it is indelible, and the love of God calls us to find it again and to live in the light of what we have found.

Our jobs starve our souls when for whatever reason the work involves selling ourselves short--this deepest self, the truest self, the self made in the image of God and intended for transformative or enlightening friendship with God.

There's no denying that all of us are self-centered some of the time, and some of us all of the time--but compassion, generosity, honor, responsibility, and self-respect are no less central to who we are as human beings. The problem here is not the jobs themselves--whether paid or unpaid--but the cultural definitions and contexts shaping how we think about the work we do.

The ideology of the marketplace insists that work is a cost-benefit contract in which every person sets his or her own needs first. As a result, whether or not the work generates a paycheck, people are apt to feel exploited. At some level, they recognize that thinking about their work this way involves selling themselves short.

Furthermore, the conditions of employment in a 24/7 global economy are increasingly capricious and brutally ruthless. From corporate boardrooms to mutual fund management companies, highly placed individuals do in fact seem to be out for themselves alone in spectacularly callous ways. Such immoral and exploitative behavior meshes dangerously with the structural ruthlessness of the "invisible hand" of the market.

As a result, employees are increasingly alienated. The reasons include long hours that disrupt personal lives and job transfers that disconnect people from communities and kinfolk in ways that dilute the common life, dissolve supportive friendships, and diminish trust. No wonder we want more to our lives than what paid employment alone can provide: Often it's not clear what, beyond this week's paycheck, we can count on jobs to offer. In this climate it can be difficult to see our jobs as morally significant, soul-satisfying contributions to the common good.

Many good people do keep this focus, of course. I've seen it in plumbers and in vascular surgeons, in high school history teachers and neighborhood opticians. I've seen it in mothers caring thoughtfully for their children and in quite elderly folks volunteering in the local kindergarten. Culture itself is stunningly dynamic because there are always counter-cultural pressures from such people.

In every time, in every place, there are always people pushing against all the default settings and commonplace assumptions of their own era. There is and has always been real pleasure to be found working for or with people like this who care deeply about doing the job right, not just collecting a paycheck.

But it's hard. And it's especially hard if you don't recognize what you are up against. As a result, many good people find themselves frustrated and unhappy without exactly understanding why--or what to do about it.

The real problem here is not that many jobs are, or become, mostly tedious routine in which it can be hard to find a consistently engaging challenge to one's talents. Thirty years ago I found that cleaning the grout of the bathroom the, like writing footnotes in correct form, deeply challenged my limited capacity to attend consistently to details. Both tasks are now simply hard work, and boring work at that. But this is the human condition: As skills grow, challenge declines. And we do thrive on worthy challenges.

The more serious problem here is that marketplace ideology has deeply disguised religious roots. The notion that we are always and inescapably self-seeking is simply a secular version of the theological argument that we are all innately depraved. But in this secular reformulation, there is no hope of grace and no possibility of salvation. We are self-centered self-seekers no matter what. Economists call that "rational actor theory."

Furthermore, the American version of marketplace ideology is deeply entangled with the theological doctrine of predestination. In secular form the doctrine looks like this: Some of us are equipped to succeed and some of us are not. We have to "make something" of ourselves or face the possibility that we are nothing at all.

This peculiar strain in American culture generates the murky but unmistakable sense that we have an essential, nearly transcendent obligation to make the most money possible, as if our net worth were the measure of our souls, and the trajectory of our careers were evidence of our ultimate salvation.

We find ourselves dangling in the grip of a capricious market like sinners in the hands of an angry God: If we are not tough competitors we are doomed, but to the extent we are merely competitive we are also miserable--frazzled, harried, overcommitted, stressed out, anxious, and lonely.

We need to disentangle our souls from this pseudo-religious complex so that we can claim--and reclaim--our honest pleasure and moral pride in a job well done. Good work serves the common good in part by honestly contributing to the particular good of colleagues, customers, students, and clients. Good work is a variety of honest, generous compassion; it is not simply the egocentric and ruthlessly amoral struggle of each against all.

Reclaiming the moral significance of good work also provides a solid basis upon which to rebalance the relationship between earning a living and having a life. Living always in good conscience centers both our work and our lives upon the sacred human capacity for compassion. Our clients and our colleagues, like our friends and our families, have moral claim upon our time, energy, and compassionate attention.

The demands of employers will not always come first if God always comes first, and with God the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. We may still have difficult decisions to make on a daily basis, but we will have a much better chance of sleeping through the night.

Above all, we need to remember that it's not up to us to make something of ourselves. God has already taken care of that. And if ultimately we have nothing to prove to God, surely we have nothing to prove to one another either.

So, whether or not there is financial reward in doing the job right and seeing the image of God in everyone, we can endeavor to do so. Good conscience can demand extraordinary courage, but it is the only possible route to honest satisfaction with our lives. We can, and we must, carefully discern the good to be sought and the evil to be avoided within our own particular circumstances. We can do what we can do and nothing more than that. Everything else must be left in God's hands.

This effort to live in good conscience may not make us rich and famous, but over time it does evoke within us that peace that surpasses human understanding. Good conscience is the "something more" available to everyone.

CATHERINE M, WALLACE is the author of Selling Ourselves Short: Why We Struggle to Earn a Living and Have a Life (Brazos Press, 2003).