A prayer before work
The prayer
Lord, I am going to work.
Let me do properly the part nobody will check.
Let me treat well the people who can do nothing for me.
Let me know when to stop, and let whatever happens here not go home on top of the people waiting for me.
And if today turns out to be a wasted day, let me not confuse my work with my worth.
Amen.
In short
This is a prayer for the start of the working day. It was written for this site and it is signed. It does not ask for success: it asks for honesty where nobody checks, for a stopping time, and for the difference between what you do and what you are worth. Below it, work before the fall.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
Before you clock in, open the laptop or get out of the car — and again at five, once the day has shown what kind of day it is.
The first two requests sound moral and are, in practice, the hardest to keep. Doing properly what nobody checks is the real test of professional honesty, because there is no external incentive holding the decision up. Treating well the people who can do nothing for you is the second test, and just as revealing: how somebody speaks to the delivery driver, the intern or whoever answers the phone describes their character better than the meeting where they know they are being assessed.
Asking to know when to stop is not praise of rest; it is damage control. Work that does not finish on time usually finishes on top of the people you live with — in a short tone, in absent attention, in a silent dinner. The prayer names that because it is the commonest side effect of a bad day, and the only one that lands on people who had no part in it.
The last stanza exists because of a specific error of our period: measuring a person by their output. People who are good at what they do are especially exposed to it, because identity and occupation fuse. Ecclesiastes recommends taking joy in your own work, and the same book insists the work passes. Held together, those two give the right proportion — the work matters, and it is not you.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared Written for Faith Flame in 2026
Christianity took a long time to treat manual work as dignified, and it was monasticism that turned that key. The Rule of Saint Benedict, from the sixth century, divides the monastic day between the office, reading and the work of the hands, and treats the last as part of the spiritual life rather than an interruption of it. That arrangement is what later became known by the motto ora et labora.
The English-speaking world inherited a second layer. The Reformation reading of vocation held that ordinary work — the shop, the farm, the household — is itself a calling, and not a lesser station beneath the religious life. Whatever one makes of the theology, it is the idea behind the fact that English still calls a job a “calling”, and it is the reason work prayers are far more common in Protestant devotion than in the older tradition.
This prayer was written for this site, and that is why it is signed. It steers clear of the subject that dominates nearly every work prayer published online, which is advancement — the promotion, the closed deal, the open door. What it asks for is what remains inside the control of the person praying: character in the job, decent treatment of people with nothing to offer, an hour to stop, and a wall between performance and self-worth.
Little-known details
Work appears before the fall, and not as a punishment for it
“Ora et labora” is not written in the Rule of Saint Benedict
What the passages say
15Thus, the Lord God brought the man, and put him into the Paradise of enjoyment, so that it would be attended and preserved by him.
The pair of verbs is the interesting part: to tend and to keep. Already in the first job in Scripture there is production and there is care, and the second term is what stops the passage being read as pure extraction.
23Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as for the Lord, and not for men.
24For you know that you will receive from the Lord the repayment of an inheritance. Serve Christ the Lord.
The verse is quoted today as an ethic of excellence, and what it actually shifts is the audience for the work: the phrase is “from the heart, as to the Lord, and not to men”. The measure stops being whoever is checking the job, which is exactly what the prayer above asks for.
22And I have discovered nothing to be better than for a man to rejoice in his work: for this is his portion. And who shall add to him, so that he may know the things that will occur after him?
The conclusion is modest and surprisingly modern: there is nothing better than for a person to rejoice in their own work, because that is their portion. The book arrives there only after discarding accumulation and reputation as answers.
3Open your works to the Lord, and your intentions will be set in order.
The verb is one of handing over, not of guaranteeing. What the text promises to settle are the intentions of the person who entrusts the work, not its results — a distinction that vanishes in the readings that turn the verse into a promise of success.