faith and work on Indispensability

My instructor in Sabbath-keeping was not a professor or spiritual director, but a foreman at the East Chicago Inland Steel plant named Mike Paddock. His wife was the treasurer of the tiny congregation...

No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have r...

Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality; it is not simply medicine but food.

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing...

The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. . . . We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choo...

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

Start by doing what is necessary, then do what's possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

Labor is not only the destiny of man; it is endowed with divine dignity.

When we insist on doing too much, we are not only inflicting the damage of this choice on ourselves, we are sharing this damage with those we love the most.

Underneath our frantic pace is a question: Is this work I do good enough?

God created the world to be a fabric, for everything to be woven together and interdependent. “

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

When we truly need to do is often what we most feel like avoiding.

We cannot prioritize our doing before being, our assignment before healing, our service before freedom.

Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the...

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a true...

We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.

Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop—because our work is never completely done. . . . If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will...

In his wonderful book Run with Horses , Eugene Peterson reminds us of many of the ways in which modern life de-personalizes and degrades us. We become a number and not a name. We are valued for wha...

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our comm...

At least one day in every seven, pull off the road and park the car in the garage. Close the door to the tool shed and turn off the computer. Stay home, not because you are sick but because you are we...

We were created for goodness and perfection. That’s why we innovate, progress, and change. But if our progress loses its purpose, it cannibalizes our humanity, leaving us distracted and disoriented.

The antidote to exhaustion is not rest but wholeheartedness.

God uses the nobodies to show himself to be somebody. God uses the nothings to show himself to be something. And maybe you feel like a nobody, a nothing. My friend, you're the one God's chosen...

Hence, whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.

As we are increasingly caught by love, our usual standards of efficiency will take a beating. . . . There are points where I may need to become a little less job-efficient if I want to be more loving.

A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.