faith and work on Perfection

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 Benedictine nun Joan Chittister recounts a story she once heard by a communications professor, which she said fundamentally changed the way she thought about success and failure: A young boy was...

Sabbath is a period of 'trying on' God's promised completion, trying on God's future. Sabbath is not rest for a privileged few while all others serve them – that's tourism. Sabbath...

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word – excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Two thousand years ago, Christians were often hunted down and killed. Amid this darkness, the church began a radical practice. When a brother or sister was martyred for faith in Jesus, the Christian c...

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it ri...

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.

Social scientists define procrastination as “delaying a task for a maladaptively long time,” and it bedevils almost all of us. One study found that more than 70 percent of university students procrast...

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.

The loveliest masterpiece of the heart of God is the heart of a mother.

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

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

None of us can be made whole till we are made whole together.

The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...

Elisabeth Elliot once stayed in the farmhouse of a Welsh shepherd and his family high in the mountains of North Wales. She stood watching one misty summer morning as the shepherd on horseback herded t...

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a...

The only way to avoid mistakes and criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

If you are what you should be, then you will set the world on fire.

One day when George MacDonald, the great Scottish preacher and writer, was talking with his son, the conversation turned to heaven and the prophets’ version of the end of all things. “It seems too goo...

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

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

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

No one image or model, however elusive or rich, can do more than offer glimpses and hints toward the divine.

Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.

Give me all of you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man...

Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

Have you ever heard of a Stradivarius violin? It’s the gold standard of violins—instantly recognizable and famously expensive. These aren’t $29.95 instruments. One sold for $1 million, another for $4 ...

Just as Jesus is the embodiment of the shalom that God intends for creation, the church’s role in the drama of Creation is likewise to be the embodiment of God’s shalom, albeit in a form that hasn’t y...