Work

I have found myself wondering over the years how many businessmen become Saints. 

God the Creator (Elizabeth Wong)

I work in business and always have.

When I was younger, my younger sister started a business – she was only seven or eight years old – printing plans for my father’s building company.

She thought this would be a great way to earn a little more money as pocket money.  My father used this to teach my sister a very valuable lesson.  He charged her for rent (for the space underneath the photocopier) and he charged her for the paper and for the ink in the machine.

To be honest her perhaps taught her a little too well.  By the end of the exercise, the printing that my sister was doing was costing her money rather than earning it for her.

Her business was insolvent because the price that she originally charged my father was far too low for the cost of the work itself.

Though my father never collected on the money my sister owed him, he did manage to teach her – and the rest of us – a valuable lesson about pricing and value and the opportunity cost of capital.  My sister discovered that it would have been cheaper for her to do nothing at all rather than to undertake the limited activity printing plans for my father.

And I have been thinking about that as I have been thinking about how business runs.

So much of business is about negotiation and valuation.  People need to value their own efforts and their time and they need to barter this value against what stakeholders in the marketplace are willing to pay in exchange for these things.

I have found myself wondering over the years how many businessmen become Saints.  It is – after all – a rather difficult thing to do, to balance business acumen and truth and honesty and fairness.  But it is not impossible.

We were created to work and work was given to us by God after the fall of humankind so that we would have some way of redeeming ourselves.  This was to life us back up and make us God-like again – for God “worked” (effortlessly because He is infinite) to create the world.

“We see in work, in men’s noble creative toil not only one of the highest human values, an indispensable means to social progress and to greater justice in the relations between men, but also a sign of God’s Love for His creatures, and of men’s love for each other and for God: we see in work a means of perfection, a way to sanctity.”  (Saint Josemaria, “Conversations”, at 10).

And I have been thinking about that as I have been thinking about the work that my God provides to me and I have been grateful – more grateful than I can know – for the wonders that God has allowed to me through this marvellous gift of work…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.