On Labor Day, if you’re lucky you get to take a day off from laboring. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on work especially in light of our faith in God. Often when someone wins the lottery, someone asks them, do you intend to quit your job? Usually the answer is an emphatic “YES”. To be honest, most of us would, don’t you think? But allow me to follow up the question to our hypothetical lottery winner with a biblical question. Was work part of God’s punishment to Adam for disobeying? We all know that after Original Sin, God cursed Adam and Eve and said, “with sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread.” (Gen3:19) However, if we read scripture carefully, we see that work itself was not the consequence of sin, it was the agony or the “sweat upon the brow” that results from sin. In Gen 2:15, we read, “Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it.” This was before the “apple incident”. Apparently, working in a garden was part of God’s idea of paradise. So, you see, work itself is not a punishment. Work indeed should be part of our happiness. Most of us who have had different jobs or worked the same kind of job with different companies recognize that going to work can be a pleasing thing or a real drag. But notice, it’s not the work itself that makes it feel like a punishment, it’s the people we work with that make it a part of paradise or a part of a miserable life.

Recall the sarcastic sign above the entrance to Auschwitz. The first comandante Rudolf Höss, had the words, “Arbeit Macht Frei”. (works makes one free) written on the entrance. It was an insult to every prisoner who walked in and out of the camp because they were forced to work for non-productive tasks, like moving a pile of rocks from here to there and back again. Or their work was to construct things of war that would be used by their enemies to help destroy their allies. Did you know that the sign itself has an upside down “B” in it? Historians debate about why it is there. Some say it was just a silly mistake. But I would like to believe that it was the workers who made it that conveyed a simple form of protest about the war. Something like the way a soldier or sailor will fly the American flag upside down as a sign of distress. To tell those prisoners that their work in the camp helped to make them free is an insult of common sense. Meaningless work or work that contributes to your own destruction is the work of slaves not of free men. In Poland, I believe there is still an award given to people who achieve good things known as the inverted B award. Those who show courage in the work of making the world a better place.

Allow me to symbolically give that award to Peter Breen. He went before a Judge in Rockford to ask for an injunction of a law that was set to go into practice that would have given the Attorney General of Illinois the right and the duty to fine crisis pregnancy centers $50,000 if someone reported evidence of “misinformation” or “deceptive” practices. According to the sponsors of the bill, telling a woman that the child in her womb is a child is misinformation. Today our work unfortunately must include opening more eyes to an evil not unlike that of Höss’.