Dear Friends,

To state the obvious, this weekend pauses to honor America’s labor force and, less directly, the value of hard work. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, once declared, “Life is defined by two things - work and love.”

For those of us who choose to explore things through the lens of faith, I want to share a quote from Wendell Berry on this topic:

“Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work. To work without love is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.”

I like the idea of God in all things.

See you on Sunday.

Carter