Permission to reprint required. I love that idea, as the daughter of a man who closed his paint store at age 85 only when his family forced the issue. Work as an expression of God's gifts at work in us, as a realization of God's keenest desires for us to spend ourselves for the world's sake and to His greater glory. Prayer, we know, is not confined to the words of formal liturgy or those we muster on our knees at daybreak and nightfall.
Prayer can be silence, full of meaning but utterly with- out content.
When I began working in the Office of the Archdeacon in October 1995, some 50 voice messages a day were piling up. It will be disorienting not to have the steady input of fax and phone, voice mail, e-mail. In the Maine fishing village that Jim and I will inhabit full time, whole days pass without a phone ringing. I think so. Ms. Paterson has been an assistant to the arch-deacon in matters of clergy deployment, parishes in transition and congregational life.