Thoughts on work

Our God is a God of purpose. He's a God of purpose. He does things on purpose, with purpose, for purpose. And there are a lot of people who think that, “Oh, we have to work, you know, because Adam and Eve messed things up in the garden.” Not so.
If you pick up your Bible, and you open up Genesis, what you'll read is that, long before the fall, God put Adam in the garden. And what did he put him in the garden to do? He put him in the garden to turn and till the soil. He put him in the garden to work.
We need work. Work is important to us. We need something to do. And the reason is because work is part of God's original design for humanity, not a result of the fall—not a result of Adam and Eve messing up in the garden so we've all got to go to work every day. No. It's part of God's original, purposeful, intentional design for the human experience.
So what's the purpose of work? What's the meaning of work? The purpose of work is that when we work well, when we work hard, when we pay attention to the details of our work, we become a-better-version-of-ourselves. And it's like you can almost feel it happening.
We live in a culture that says the meaning of work is to make money. Absolutely wrong. Do we need money? Yes. Do we need to pay our bills? Absolutely. Does that need to be part of the consideration when we take a job? No question. But it is not the primary purpose of work. It's a secondary outcome of work. The primary purpose of work is that when we work hard, when we apply ourselves to our work, when we pay attention to the details of our work, we actually become better human beings. We become more perfectly ourselves. We become a-better-version-of-ourselves. We take a step closer to the-best-version-of-ourselves. We grow in virtue, we grow in character.
We live in a culture where work's got a bad reputation: “Oh, I've gotta go to work.” No. We get to go to work. We get to go to work. And work plays a very important role in the development of the human being.

Matthew Kelly