God’s providence in our work

MAY 1, Feast of St. Joseph the Worker. In the secular world, it’s celebrated as Labor Day, highlighting the importance of our work in the development of our society and, first of all, of our personal life. Yes, our work plays a very important and strategic role in the different aspect and levels of our life. 

 What we need to realize more deeply is that God’s constant interventions in our life, that is, his providence and governance over all his creation, is played out most especially in our work, where our human and world development takes place. 

 We need to convince ourselves that our life and everything in it, including our work especially, is not an isolated and unrelated element in the very fluid ocean of the universe. We are always a vital part of a whole plan of God’s love and wisdom, a verse in the divine epic of the continuing work of God over all of his creation. 

 We have to overcome our tendency to have a very restrictive, narrow and shallow view of our life, ruled solely by mere human estimation of things, worldly standards and criteria, instead of our faith that gives us the complete vision of things and the adequate means to reach our ultimate end. 

 This realization should behoove us to develop a most sensitive ability to discern God’s interventions as we go through our work. We should be guided by God’s abiding interventions rather than simply by our own ideas, no matter how brilliant they may appear to be. 

 Yes, we have to learn to work and, in fact, to live our whole life under God’s providence. As our Catechism puts it, providence are “the dispositions by which God guides his creation toward their perfection…By his providence God protects and governs all things which he has made…(n. 302) 

 Furthermore, the Catechism says that “the solicitude of divine providence is concrete and immediate; God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history.” (n. 303) 

 We should try our best to correspond to God’s constant presence and interventions. That is why, we need to cultivate our spiritual life, our relation with God which is otherwise called as our religion, that has to be constantly nourished through a life of piety that should be kept as vibrant as possible. 

 Otherwise, there is no other way but for us to fall into self-indulgence that has no other possible end than tragedy. We would be easy prey to our weaknesses, the many temptations around and sin itself. 

 That is why the Catechism tells us that “Jesus asks for childlike abandonment to the providence of our heavenly Father who takes care of his children’s smallest needs.” (n. 305). We should not dare to live solely on our own, something that we need effort to uphold, since our tendency is to think that we can simply be on our own. 

 We just have to learn and develop a healthy sense of abandonment in the mysterious will and ways of God. What can help in this regard is to cultivate also a sporting attitude to life. We win some, we lose some, but in the end, God takes care of everything as long as we always go to him! 

 The upshot of all these considerations should be that we develop a working contemplative lifestyle especially as we immerse ourselves in our work. That way, we can easily discern God’s providential interventions as we tackle the technical aspects and the other temporal factors of our work.