“The girl pounding her typewriter may be pounding for nothing but dollars’ sake and wishing she could stop. The Poor Clare sweeping the monastery cloisters is doing it for God’s sake and prefers sweeping, at that particular hour, to any other occupation in the world.”
Mother Mary Francis
Let’s say that you’re a housekeeper cleaning the rooms of a cheap motel. It is not glamorous or easy, but you do good work. You’re working there to feed your family. Or you’re a nurse changing sheets at the nursing home. Or maybe you have the easiest job in the world. It is not what you do that is important, what matters is the love you have in your heart when you do it. So says Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C. in her book, A Right to Be Merry: “This is another of the marvels of living in obedience. No one is ever doing anything more important than you are, if you are obeying. A broom, a pen, a needle are all the same to God. The obedience of the hand that plies them and the love in the heart of the nun who holds them are what make an eternal difference to God, to the nuns, and to all the world.”
Later in the book she adds: “As with writing, so with all else. Work is done simply and without consideration for the comparative dignity of varying tasks or enterprises. Such comparisons could never be anything but specious for cloistered nuns, whose work has a common dignity in that it is done with a common love and for one Lover.”
So don’t worry about moving up the ladder, or getting a great job or position at a prestigious company. Just worry with doing well what you’re supposed to be working on, on what you’re working on right now.