List of points

Let us work. Let us work a lot and work well, without forgetting that prayer is our best weapon. That is why I will never tire of repeating that we have to be contemplative souls in the middle of the world, who try to convert their work into prayer.

When you started your ordinary work again, something like a groan of complaint escaped you: “It’s always the same!”

And I told you: “Yes, it’s always the same. But that ordinary job —which is the same one your fellow workers do — has to be a constant prayer for you. It has the same lovable words, but a different tune each day.”

It is very much our mission to transform the prose of this life into poetry, into heroic verse.

Ejaculatory prayers do not hinder your work, just as the beating of your heart does not impede the movements of the body.

Sanctifying one’s work is no fantastic dream, but the mission of every Christian — yours and mine.

—That is what that lathe-worker had discovered, when he said: “I am overwhelmed with happiness when I think how true it is that while I am working at the lathe and singing — singing all the time, on the outside and on the inside — I can become a saint. How good God is!”

Your work has become disagreeable, especially when you see how little your colleagues love God and at the same time flee from grace and the good services you want to render them.

You have to try to make up for all that they leave out. You must give yourself to God in work too, as you have done up to now, and convert it into prayer that rises to Heaven for all mankind.

Some people act out of prejudice in their work: on principle they trust nobody, and it goes without saying that they do not understand the need to seek to sanctify their job. If you mention it to them they tell you not to add another burden to their own work, which they put up with reluctantly as if they were supporting a heavy weight.

—That is one of the battles of peace we have to win: to find God in our work and, with Him and like Him, serve others.

Place on your desk, in your room, in your wallet… a picture of Our Lady, and look at it when you begin your work, while you are doing it, and when you finish it. She will obtain, I assure you!, the strength for you to turn your task into a loving dialogue with God.