Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation).Wendell Berry
About This Quote
In the past, people would often refer to a person as a "good work" or a "good human". In other words, a good work is a virtuous person, and a good human is someone who respects and honors God's work. When we see a person doing something that disrespects the earth or the things that are made, we should call this person out on it. In today's world, we have incredibly strong moral codes that tell people not to harm the earth or tell people not to do evil.
If you see someone doing something that harms the earth, call them out on it. If you see someone doing something that dishonors or disrespects God's work, tell them about it so they can repent and be saved.
Some Similar Quotes
- Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you're wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore.
- Work without love is slavery.
- There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
- Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea...
- I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am...
More Quotes By Wendell Berry
- Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.
- What I stand for is what I stand on.
- The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use...
- Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure...
- I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed...