Yesterday, America (and Canada) celebrated Labor Day.  It's a good day.  It's a day to take time to think about and honor those who, like many of us, work, those who, day after day after day, engage in some type of vocational occupation.
     Most of us accept work as an inevitable fact of existence.  In many respects, it is. Most of us must work. Not all of us of course necessarily like what we do.  Not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day.
     Nonetheless, rightly understood, working can give us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we echo the fact of a personal creator.  We express our meaningfulness, we manifest that we have a point.  And we contribute to the greater good of existence:  we testify that we are not, as Sartre put it, "useless passions."  In addition, we are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than merely living day to day, that we are made with purpose and reason.  Indeed, whether you know it or not, if you work, you're testifying, testifying every day, to the necessity of an intelligent and personal creator.

     For in a world shorn of such presence, why would we do anything?