Alright, these twelve to fourteen hour workdays I’ve been pounding out for the past three months are starting to get to me. Besides the irregular blogging (sounds like a medicinal side effect doesn’t it), I’m aching, cantankerous, and just all around miserable. Lord help me, I think I’m turning into… Joe Don Baker!
Ah well, best not to complain too much about a job these days I suppose. And besides, if Pope John Paul II was right, there’s more than just a paycheck to be gained from it all. In his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens: On Human Work, he wrote that “work is a good thing for man - a good thing for his humanity - because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes "more a human being." Work can accomplish this for us because, as the Catechism points out, “work honors the Creator's gifts and the talents received from him. It can also be redemptive. By enduring the hardship of work in union with Jesus, the carpenter of Nazareth and the one crucified on Calvary, man collaborates in a certain fashion with the Son of God in his redemptive work. He shows himself to be a disciple of Christ by carrying the cross, daily, in the work he is called to accomplish.”
I like that. Now the next time my job is going to cause me to get home a little late, I can just tell my wife I’m sorry, I know the boy is driving her crazy and she needs a break, but I have to do my part to save the world. That should work, right?
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