The world really doesn't need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs deep people, people who know that they need solitude if they are going to find out who they are:
silence, if their words are to mean anything;
reflection if their actions are to have any significance;
contemplation, if they are to see the world as it really is;
prayer, if they are going to be conscious of God,
if they are to "know God and enjoy God forever".
The world needs people who want their lives not only to be filled, but to be full and fulfilled ... The world needs people who will allow time for God to recreate them, play with them, touch them as an Artist who is making something beautiful with their lives.
We become better at something in ourselves—more skilled, more creative, more effective—when we work. We discover that, indeed, we are good for something. Good work is, at the time, its own kind of asceticism. It needs no symbolic rituals or contrived penances.
The very act of continuing something until we succeed at it is soul-searing, life-changing enough... It makes us equal partners with the rest of the human race in this one common endeavor to grow the globe to wholeness. Good work is our gift to the future. It is what we leave behind—our persistence, our precision, our commitment, our fidelity to the smallest and meanest of tasks that will change the mind of generations to come about our sacred obligation to bear our share of the holy-making enterprise that is work.
