Why We Work

The Stone Breaker, Gustave Courbet, 1849

Today Americans celebrate Labor Day—a federal holiday that pays tribute to the achievements of American workers by giving them an extra day to rest.

Many of us live for these breaks from the normal work schedule. Many of us will have a hard time waking up tomorrow, knowing that there are four more days until the weekend. And many of us can’t stop thinking about the next job we’re working towards or the day we retire.

Even if you love your career, chances are that you’ve thought one of these things before. We are human, and these feelings are natural—especially the desire for rest. But God also made us for work, and He made us to work.

Saint John Paul II explored this idea in his 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens. In his introduction, he reminds the faithful that, in being made in the image and likeness of God, we are made to work:

THROUGH WORK man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself. Man is made to be in the visible universe an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.

Work is our mark. It is what we are made to do, and it’s what distinguishes us from all other creatures.

We typically forget these ideas as we fumble over the coffee machine in the morning, but they are good to remember during those times when we don’t know why we set our alarm clocks every day. Whether you just insert data in Excel sheets, whether you fix air-conditioning units, or whether you teach a rowdy bunch of kindergartners—you were made for this.

So as we enjoy the last day of summer with family, friends, and barbequed hot dogs, let us take time to remember the true value of the work that we are resting from.

Saint John Paul II, Pray for Us!

The content for this post is taken from a piece published here in 2012.