In His creation of the universe, God gifted man a body, mind, heart, and spirit so that he can exercise the capacity to think, act, relate, and learn. A careful interpretation of the relevant biblical passages in Genesis leads to the fundamental thought that God wanted man to work in the service of the Lord and humanity, exactly the reason why He gave man the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties.

And when God tasked Adam to tend and keep the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15), and gave him a partner in the person of Eve for the purpose of work and other providential designs, it became clearer that man was carved out of a divine desire for him to be at work. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, God was even more emphatic when He stated: "cursed is the ground for your sake, in toil you shall eat of it all the day of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field." (Genesis 3:17b-18)

As we can sense and experience even today, work is indeed the rationale for man's existence. Had man not worked, in direct contravention of God's will, the whole universe could have long folded up; it could not have been the beneficiary of man's creativity, innovativeness, and inventiveness.

Work, as it is generally defined, is an activity where we exert our strengths, uses our faculties, and adopts our skills in order to address some needs. Our need could either be: achieve an objective, overcome an obstacle, and almost always, generate earnings for our sustained livelihood. Work, therefore, refers to a continuum of labor, task, or duty that we have to perform lest we drop out of the human race on failure to be competitive, functional, productive, and contributory to society.

A job is different from a work. Job refers to a function or activity from which something is earned by the holder; it is practically compensation-related. Work means the conduct of an activity to accomplish a certain need or goal, and may not necessarily be pay-driven e.g. the wife cooking, or cleaning the house, or doing the laundry, or tutoring the children. Being out of job is financially tragic and frustrating. But being out of work is fatal. Although a person that has no work to do is never a providential error, he, however, stands as an abject representation of futility, nothingness, and failure in his own right and volition. The quantity and quality of work that a person does is reflective of the kind

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