Work Better This Month In Honor of St. Joseph

Photo by monosodium (2006) via Morguefile.

June is the month of St. Joseph, the man whom God chose to be head of the Holy Family. Hard-working, loyal, and loving, he was the perfect earthly father for Jesus. In honor of this beautiful man, we can offer to God our best work this month.

Heaven knows how hard moms and dads work each day. So perhaps instead of thinking how we can work harder this month we could consider how we might work better. Below are a few humble suggestions for how we could improve upon what we’re already doing:

- Institute a St. Joseph Hour

Perhaps in the morning, this hour could be dedicated to doing our work the best we can. The oven timer could be set for an hour, while parents and kids head off to their separate “work,” the kids to crafts or projects or books that they hadn’t had time for during the school year and Mom or Dad to whatever is most pressing. The rule: everyone has to do their best work and all questions or comments from the kids must wait until the buzzer goes off.

- Entrust Social Media to St. Joseph

The temptation to melt away into social media land when boredom strikes is so strong, but a nice June exercise might be to cut down on social media, keeping it to pre-set times so that it doesn’t take over the day. St. Joseph would be very happy, I’m sure, to help us keep tabs on our own screen time so that we could better devote ourselves to the task at hand.

- Make a Time-Specific Chore Plan

Summer to-do lists might range from “survive” to a hundred-item check list. We might be more successful in completing those jobs, though, if we plan on a specific time during the day when we’ll get to them. If nothing else gets done, I can be sure that at 2:30 p.m. I will check in with myself to see that I am indeed surviving summer and if so, offer a prayer of thanks to God that everyone is still in one piece or that at 10 a.m. this morning I was scrubbing toilets like I’d planned on doing. Even if I am only able to complete that one job, that’s still a successful task that I can offer up.

Doing our work better for God this month will help relieve some of the stress that summer brings and will help us grow in relationship with St. Joseph, who surely will take care of us as well as he did the Holy Family. What a beautiful month this could be.

Copyright Meg Matenaer (2015).
Photo by monosodium (2006) via Morguefile.