The gift of work
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The Narrative
After God creates Adam, He makes a garden for the man, and places him in it. It’s a garden that has everything Adam could ever want, except for Eve, and she shows up soon afterwards. But when God gives Adam the garden, He isn’t just giving him something to satisfy his physical needs. He’s also giving Adam a project. He’s giving him something important to do.
Genesis says that “God settled the man in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and care for it.”
This is one of God’s greatest and earliest gifts to the human race. It is the gift of meaningful work.
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Participation in God’s Creative Activity
It’s often pointed out that God entrusts Adam with work before the fall, before our first parents committed the sin that compromised their happiness in so many ways. Because meaningful work is not, in itself, a curse, or a punishment. It’s a joy. And it’s a joy precisely because it’s one of the ways that we live out our call to be children of God.
One of the greatest joys young children have is to help their dad with his work, or his job. It brings children and parents together when the children feel like they’re really contributing.
God, Our Father, has given us this joy to help Him in His work.
St. John Paul II, in his great encyclical on human work, says that this is the fundamental meaning of human work. It’s a chance to participate in God’s creative activity.
Genesis talks about God “working” those first six days to make a good world but when He tells Adam to cultivate the garden and care for it, He’s giving Adam the opportunity to work alongside Him in perfecting creation, in making the world a better place.
St. Paul calls us “co-workers” with God. That’s an incredible title.
God could have just done everything in creation by Himself. But He invites His children to work with Him. Because to do so is a great joy and connects us more closely to Him.
What a Good Father God is!
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Making the World a Better Place
When we talk about “making the world a better place,” that has to mean, first and foremost, making the world a better place for people. It has to mean that we are serving God’s other children somehow through our work.
So we answer the question “how does our work make the world a better place?” by answering the question “whom does our work serve?” And the answer should be everyone!
Our work should serve our customers and clients. It should serve our bosses. It should serve our students, or our teachers. It should serve our kids and our spouses. It should serve society as a whole (if society on the whole would be better off without our work, it’s hard to see how our work makes the world a better place).
Our work should serve our families, not only through the paycheck we bring home, but through our example, and through the way our different jobs can come into play in educating our kids.
Last, but not least, our work is a service to us! Work engages our intellects and our creative freedom.
Work causes us, hopefully, to develop specialized skills, and to learn skills we probably wouldn’t have otherwise bothered to acquire.
Work is often one of the best places to learn humility and courtesy and trust in God’s providence.
All these goods, all these forms of human perfection, are much harder to come by, without the great gift of work.
This is why someone like St. Josemaria Escriva spent so much time encouraging the faithful to pursue sanctity in their jobs. Because, really, work provides one of the best places to gain virtue and become the people God meant us to be.
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Work as “Toil”
Now it is true that after Adam and Eve sinned, God warned that Adam’s work would take on the character of “toil”. Work becomes tedious, difficult, stressful, uncertain. Finding good work, meaningful work, becomes a real challenge. But these unpleasant, negative aspects of our work don’t eliminate any of the goods that work offers.
Work is still a participation in God’s creative activity. It’s still supposed to be a service to others. It can still be a perfection of the worker himself.
Now it’s painful, yes, but that pain and irritation can be put to good work in counteracting our vices, vices like pride, self-sufficiency, laziness, impatience and self-indulgence.
More than that, since we are Christians, and we believe that when united to Christ our suffering has the capacity to help save souls, the aggravation we get from work can become one more contribution to the world.
When we do meaningful work, we participate in God’s creative activity. When we suffer at work, we can participate in God’s redemptive activity.
The toil aspect of work, far from taking away from work’s value, can (from a Christian perspective) actually enhance the value of work. It can help save our souls and the souls of other people.
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Resolve to remember the good of your work
Before you go to bed tonight, write down how your work serves God and makes the world a better place. Write down how your work serves the people around you, how your work is good for society, and how your work makes you a better person.
It may take some thinking to figure out exactly how your work does those things but it’s worth thinking about. Because we’re supposed to spend our time not just earning money, but doing good for God and neighbor. And our work, whether at home or at the office, is one of the primary ways we do that.
So write down how you are doing good at work. And then, when your job becomes unpleasant and frustrating, take out what you’ve written and look at it, and thank God for His gift of work.