* From her book ‘The Holiness of Everyday Life’ under the above title, Joan B. MacDonald, wrote:
Discipline, evaluation, striving for excellence, and developing personal integrity—these are common experiences of the workplace that help develop character. But developing character isn’t enough. I said that work can develop and reveal our souls. A soul is more than character. To develop one’s soul implies a deep spiritual effort, and to be spiritual implies a connection to God.
Many people, both in and out of the Church hunger for a deeper connection with God in their daily lives. How do we get that connection? What are we really after? Why do we sometimes hurry through days sometimes wondering, “Is this all there is?” I don’t know about you, but I need more. I need meaning and I need God shining through and revealing himself around me. I think most of us do. We need to see, understand and experience God. We also need to know and understand ourselves. We want to know our strengths and our weaknesses, why we do what we do, and how we can do better. Finally we want to know that these things connect. We want to know that God loves us and accepts us as we are, and we want to experience him helping us become better, every day and in every situation. We are in luck, because the revealing God, of ourselves, and of the connection between ourselves and God occurs all around us, and occurs a lot at work. The key to seeing it is awareness.
We start by becoming aware of what work teaches us about ourselves. Do we approach work eagerly or reluctantly? Are we fast or slow, careful or sloppy? What do we do well? Are we kind or harsh, encouraging or critical? If we but pay attention to what we do, and how we are while we are doing it, we can learn a great deal about ourselves. As we work at this learning and then at improving, we can invite our Heavenly Father into the process to help us bring our behavior and attitudes closer to his. Once we start inviting our Heavenly Father into our efforts at work, we have done a great thing—we have started to think about God while we are at work. We have opened our minds and thus our consciousness to the possibility of God’s presence in the workplace. Then we are ready for the next step, looking for ways God might reveal himself to us at work.~Joan B. Mac Donald, The Holiness of Everyday Life (Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, 1995) 9-10 (continued)
