Working towards God

After a long and dreary day of work, and really, a long and arduous week of Arbeit, I read this, and it was good.

"Work puts human beings in the world of things. It requires achievement from them. Christians slep out of the world of personal encounter into the world of impersonal things. the It; and this new encounter frees them for objectivity, for the world of the It is only an instrument in the hands of God for the purification of Christian from all self-absorption and selfishness. The work of the world can only be accomplished where people forget themselves, where they lose themselves in a cause, reality, the task, the It. Christians learn at work to allow the task to set the bounds for them. Thus, for them, work becomes a remedy for the lethargy and laziness of the flesh. The demands of the flesh die in the world of things. But that can only happen where Christians break through the It to the You of God, who commands the work and the deed and makes them serve to liberate Christians from themselves."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p75.