Tag Archives: work

God Loves Clean Floors

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Update: Evidently the source of this quote can’t be found because Martin Luther didn’t really say it! Please see the links in the Vanessa’s comments below.

 
I’ve posted this quote before, but here’s another sentence to add.  And, frankly, I need the reminder.  I still don’t know the source of this quote, other than Martin Luther.  This quote is found in Mark Buchanan’s book The Rest of God, a book I’d highly recommend.

The maid who sweeps her kitchen
is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays–
not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps
but because God loves clean floors.
The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty
not by putting little crosses on the shoes,
but by making good shoes,
because God is interested in good craftmanship.~ Martin Luther

 

Looking Over the Edge

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You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. 

And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else.   You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that – if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.  No matter what a man is – I wouldn’t give twopence for him – here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers – whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.    

~ George Eliot in Middlemarch

This last week before school begins, this week before we celebrate those who labor by goofing off, I’m thinking about work, praying and preparing for long, hard days ahead.  I confess that I do look over the edge of my work.  Just this morning I was yearning for the opportunity to read something “just for fun” aka  self-indulgent stuff.   The summer has come and will soon be over.  I have two years left of home schooling and I would surely like to “learn to do it well” without excuses (“there’s this and there’s that”) or whining.

Gearing Up to Labor

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It is not only prayer that gives God glory, but work.  Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty.  To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but to take food in thankfulness and temperance gives him glory too.   To lift up hands in prayer gives God gory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail gives him glory too.  His is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.  So then, my brethren, live.
                          ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Principle or Foundation