a) What is work?
Work is any activity in which we exert effort, usually to gain something for ourselves, to help others, or to learn new things (for example: household chores wherein we help our family, especially our parents; school projects and activities; study; parish work as an Altar Server, etc.). Through our work, we cooperate with God, in our own little way and in our particular circumstances, to make this world a better place to live in.
By doing our work well, not only do we help our parents, our brothers and sisters, our priests and our teachers, but rather, we also become more industrious and responsible. By being faithful in our little duties, we become more prepared for greater tasks, we become better persons, we can help others better, and we become more ready to answer God’s call at all times.
b) How can we do our work well?
An Altar Server should strive to work as hard as he could, even in the easiest tasks. By fighting idleness and laziness (right from the start, when we wake up), we can work more intensely; and by working in an orderly way (for example, by making a good daily schedule, by asking whenever we don’t know how to do our task, by not leaving for tomorrow what we can do today, by taking the necessary rest, etc.) we can do many more things and make better use of our time, which is a gift from God. Whenever we can, we may also learn many new skills and techniques in order to make us more capable of doing different types of work.
In our morning offering, as soon as we wake up, we offer to God all our activities for the day. By keeping the presence of God, we renew frequently this offering that we have made, and ask him to help us in all that we do. We thus convert our work into a continuous prayer by being responsible, by doing our task as if God himself had asked us to do it (and not by working just for the sake of finishing it, or to have a good image).