work.

"Without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work...

"Work plunges men into the world of things. The Christian steps out of the world of brotherly encounter and into the world of impersonal things, the "it"; and this new encounter frees him for objectivity; for the "it"-world is an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of all Christians from self-centeredness and self-seeking.

"The work of the world can be done only when a Christian forgets himself, where he loses himself in a cause, a reality, a task, the "it". In work the Christian learns to allow himself to be limited by the task, and thus for him the work becomes a remedy against the indolence and sloth of the flesh. The passions of the flesh die in the world of things. But this can only happen when the Christian breaks through the "it" to the "Thou", which is God, who bids him work and makes that work a means of liberation from himself."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer