When Work Hurts: Building Resilience When You’re Beat Up or Burnt Out by Meryl Herr. IVP. 196 pages. 2025
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It would be hard to find someone who has not experienced hurt at work, be it a poor performance review, being passed over for a promotion, relationship conflict, etc. Experiencing hurt with our work can also often carry into other aspects of our lives. In this helpful book, Meryl Herr looks at the various ways we can experience hurt at work and what we can do about it. As she does, she walks us through the story of the Israelites from the fall of Jerusalem, their journey into exile, and back home again. She spends the majority of time in what  the Hebrew Scriptures treated as a single book: Ezra-Nehemiah.

The author writes about what it looks and feels like when work beats us up, burns us out, or breaks our hearts. Along the way, she introduces us to several people who have experienced all types of work hurt, including herself. At the end of each chapter, she includes a helpful “Work Hurt Clinic” where you can revisit some of the main ideas and begin to apply some of the practices.

Among the many aspects of hurt we experience with our work that she addresses in the book are disappointment, disillusionment, despair, displacement (vocational, relational, spiritual), vocational discernment, everyday faithfulness, our sense of calling, toxic workplaces and bosses, courage, exploitation, oppression, burnout, overworking, and hope.

The author tells us that disappointment at work is an everyday experience for most of us. This is a helpful book to help us with the hurts we experience with our work.

Here are 10 of my favorite quotes from the book:

• Work isn’t supposed to be fraught with so much disappointment and despair. God designed work to be a delight.
• Difficult circumstances don’t necessarily negate a calling. But they may propel us into a season of discernment in which we have to locate our calling, our sense of purpose, buried in all the rubble.
• To work for the common good doesn’t mean we work for the flourishing of only ourselves and those like us. We work for the flourishing of the whole world.
• Flourishing in moments of displacement is possible. Everyday faithfulness is key.
• To engage in vocational discernment is to attempt to perceive or gain clarity about your vocation, or calling. The goal of vocational discernment is direction, not certainty.
• Sometimes, the best way to recover our sense of calling is simply to show up to the work that’s right in front of us.
• Regardless of how we experience the job market, we learn from the Scriptures that God is with us always, honoring our work of everyday faithfulness and achieving more than we could ever imagine.
• As Christians, we serve others through our work because God has loved us and commanded us to love him and to love our neighbor.
• The essence of calling is that God invites us to follow him and partner in his redemptive work in the world.
• Hope is more than wishful thinking. Hope is believing and watching for God to fulfill his promises. It is future oriented.