Earlier this week, 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 most 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. However, not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day. Nonetheless, to work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  Ideally, work challenges us, involves us, equips us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.

     More broadly speaking, 

work has a point.  When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we affirm our meaningfulness.  Whether we know it or not, when we work, we are contributing and communicating.  We are contributing to the greater good of the planet, we are communicating the presence of a meaningful world.  We are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than merely living day to day.  We are stating that although, yes, we must in most instances work to survive, we nevertheless see hope and meaning beyond it.  We affirm that we are made with purpose.

      Absent an intentional beginning, shorn of a God, the cosmos has no reason to be.  And we have no reason to work.  Beyond the authenticating boost it might give us, a boost which never lasts, why would it matter?  We live, work, and die.
     Oddly enough, work, whatever it may be, testifies to the fact of a meaningful universe, a therefore personal universe, a universe which, therefore in turn, is made, somehow, some way, by a personal God.