The opening scene of the timeless family film Madagascar depicts the exuberant zebra, Marty, having an identity crisis.

Marty – along with his three friends, Gloria the hippopotamus, Melman the giraffe and Alex the lion – wants more from his life. He wants to flourish.

And for him, his job as the token zebra in the New York Central Park Zoo isn’t providing the kind of flourishing that his heart longs for.

Marty’s predicament is not difficult to identify with.

Though we may define “flourishing” in slightly different ways, the longing for a life of flourishing is ubiquitous to the human heart.

And the workplace is where many of us turn in order to find it.

But what is “flourishing”?

It is a question that humankind has debated for millennia, and one that I certainly don’t purport to satisfy here. However, there are some things we can reasonably say about flourishing.

The parallels between Marty’s struggles and our own reveal at least three central components to flourishing:

• Finding belonging
• Finding significance
• Finding purpose

While we differ on how we define each of these, in some way we are all trying to fit in, to have our achievements recognised and to find and fulfil our purpose.

The problem is that when we try and do it on our own, we inevitably run into trouble.

Three pillars

The prevailing secularist narrative leads people to reject God and look inside themselves to find answers to all three pillars of flourishing.

We are urged to find our tribe to which to belong, to achieve in order to gain significance and to self-discover in order to find our purpose.

Ultimately, it’s all up to us and it usually plays out in our workplace.

The problem, of course, is that such an approach does not work.

Those of us who centre our lives exclusively on work are left exhausted, despondent, unfulfilled or a combination of all three.

The evidence is conclusive. Thanks to communications technology, we are the most interconnected we have ever been but we are the loneliest we have ever been.

We work hard to build homes, bank accounts and identities for ourselves but we still struggle for significance.

We look inside ourselves for answers yet all we find are more questions.

The answer is clear.

When we reject God, we must bear the burden of our own flourishing. As a result we are forced to anchor our sense of belonging, our significance and our purpose to two things that are intrinsically unreliable: Our own efforts at work and the volatility of man-made cultural, political, economic, social and moral systems.

Divinely endowed 

Our individual and collective experience reveals a ground-breaking truth – that belonging must be transcendentally anchored, significance must be eternally grounded and purpose must be divinely endowed.

When we consider these three truths, the Christian message comes roaring to life.

The message of Jesus Christ is the only way through which forgiveness, significance and divine purpose are offered freely alongside adoption into the eternal family of God.

The fact that this unique offer of relationship comes freely through unconditional grace, simply adds an experiential cherry to the existential sundae.

As Marty the zebra himself discovers, true flourishing doesn’t come from within, it comes from without, and it is anchored not in effort but in relationship.

We all have that unconditional offer of a loving relationship with our Creator God through the person of Jesus Christ. Through Him, we are promised eternal belonging, enduring identity and divinely endowed purpose.

That purpose – to be in loving relationship with God himself – is what so often alludes us amidst the haze of our failed self-actualisation.

It is this divinely endowed purpose that the great thinker and writer St Augustine referred to when he so powerfully wrote: “O’God, you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

Like Marty, perhaps we need to make peace with the reality that we cannot ultimately control our environment or our circumstances – at work or anywhere else.

However, we have the incredible offer of flourishing through a relationship with God amidst the volatility of a broken world.

God himself came into the world – as Jesus Christ – to die on a cross for you, to give you the forgiveness you don’t deserve, the relationship you so deeply yearn for and the flourishing your heart seeks after.

As you approach the challenges, successes and opportunities at work that 2019 brings, remember: The key to flourishing in the 21^st century workplace begins by understanding that true flourishing cannot be achieved in the 21^st century workplace.

Our only hope for true flourishing is through relationship with Jesus Christ.

Once we step into this relationship, we are freed to embrace challenges, enjoy successes and endure failures at work, secure in the assurance that our belonging, significance and purpose are anchored in the loving heart of God.