From Wendell Berry’s essay “Christianity and The Survival of Creation” (Via A. Jacob’s Article):
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, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, 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.
AND
In the end, though, it comes down to seeing that many of us carry around a fantasy of “the uninterrupted life” that does nothing but make real life harder than it needs to be. In any case, the fantasy is usually an impossible one: my finitude means I definitely can’t spend as much time on my work and with my family as I’d like – due to maths – and this wouldn’t change were I magically to acquire the power to dictate how every hour of my day unfolded. C. S. Lewis, writing of course from a Christian perspective, summed things up lucidly:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.
