Dear Lord, Thank you for the gift of work. Thank you for the dignity and purpose it grants to us and for the many ways it reveals your character to us. Open our eyes to see the ways you are at work in our work today. Grant us insight into the challenges and tensions we face. Increase in us love for those with whom we work and serve. Where our efforts feel small and inconsequential, expand our vision and sense of purpose. Where we are tempted to think of our work or efforts more highly than we ought, hem us in. In every way grant us divine perspective as we labor for you and your Kingdom this day. All this we ask in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Well-Said Quotables
“Genesis does not present the creation as a finished product, wrapped up with a big red bow and handed over to the creations to keep it exactly as originally created. It is not a one-time production. Indeed for the creation to stay just as God originally created it would constitute a failure of the divine design. From God’s perspective, the world needs work; development and change are what God intends for it, and God enlists human beings (and other creations) to that end. From another angle, God did not exhaust the divine creativity in the first week of the world; God continues to create and uses creatures in a vocation that involves the becoming of creation.”
Terence Fretheim
Creation Untamed, quoted in Ben Witherington, Work