SAFCAM Communique #50 

SAFCAM Communique #50            01/05/2021 

Dear Subscribers

Happy feast of St Joseph the Worker!

SAFCAM news:

- Fr Camiel has been mandated by the Rector Major to perform the extraordinary visitation in the vice-province of ATE substitute for Don Guillermo Basanes who had hardly begun it when he was interrupted by being appointed provincial of AFC. Thus, Camiel is going to be absent for over 2 months from his Safcam responsibilities and will be missed at DBYES.

- The current sessions on Education to Love continue with a subscription of 40-45 per francophone session, while the anglophone sessions are attracting only around 15 participants.

Some random thoughts about work on this ‘Labour’ weekend:

- It is only those who never work that never make any mistakes, but their whole life is one.

- Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.

- Work for the Lord – the pay is not much good, but the benefits are out of this world.

- By working eight hours a day, you might eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.

- People are never too tired to tell you how hard they have worked.

- Duty makes us do things well: love makes us do them beautifully.

- Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99% perspiration.

- Even in my grandparents’ days there was something to help you sleep better – they called it work.

- Idle young people become unhappy and grumpy old people.

- Some people work and accomplish in a week what no one else can in seven days.

- If you want an easy job to seem mighty hard, just keep putting it off.

- Too much rest can be more harmful than too much work.

- It is tiresome to do nothing, because you cannot stop and take a rest.

- People like hard work particularly when they are paying for it.

- The ones who do only what is required of them and no more, are slaves. The moment they do more than that, they become free persons.

- If you don’t want to have to work, you have to work hard to earn enough, so you won’t have to work.

- If you keep thinking that you’re working harder than most average people, then you are an average worker.

- There is no work below the dignity of anyone if he/she does it right and with love.

- This world is full of willing people – some willing to work, others willing to let them do it.

- Housework is work you do that nobody notices unless you don’t do it.

- God forgive me if I am not exhausted at the end of each day.

- Work is the only thing one never regrets.

- Work is something you do so that a day will come when you won’t have to work.

- “If anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2Thess3:10).

- Expecting success without hard work, is like trying to harvest where you have not sown.

- The becoming of the worker is as important, and more, as the doing of the work.

- The Lord gave you two ends to make use of. One for sitting on, the other to do your thinking with.

Your success depends on which end you use most. Heads you win, tails you lose.

- People who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for more than they do.

- Most people would recognize an opportunity if it didn’t look so much like hard work.

- Hard work used to be a virtue; unfortunately, it has come to be considered a curse.

- God gives every bird its food, but he doesn’t throw it into their nests.

- No nation will prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

- Things are worth the work by which you earned them; if you get something for nothing it will be worth nothing.

- No day is long enough for those who enjoy working.

- The reason worry kills more people than work, is that more people worry than work.

- Opportunity often goes around disguised as hard work; that explains why so many fail to find it.

- More people grow crooked by dodging hard work, than become bent through honest labour.

- Many people are like blisters; they don’t show up till the work is almost done.

- Dodging work is the hardest work of all, and it yields the poorest returns.

Prayer intentions for May:

- In addition to the pre-arranged monthly list of Papal intentions (this month it is for the World of Finance – “Let us pray that those in charge of finance will work with governments to regulate the financial sphere and protect citizens from its dangers”), Pope Francis has organized a prayer marathon through the month of May, inviting the faithful, families and communities to recite the rosary to invoke the end of the pandemic.

The Pope is launching this Saturday 1^st May at 18h00 (Rome time), in Saint Peter's Basilica, this prayer marathon in order to ask God for the end of the pandemic. It will ‘travel’ through thirty Marian shrines around the world. Each day of May a Marian shrine will assume the relay with a particular prayer intention.

And on YouTube, Vatican News, will broadcast each day at 18h00, the prayer said in one of the thirty shrines participating in the marathon. We can participate in it at that time, watching online and reciting our rosary.

- And our Salesian intention for May is for fair distribution and regulation of funding in South Africa, Lesotho and Eswatini (and everywhere else too!).

Recommended viewing:

https://youtu.be/PJ-fS7cWUhA - Amoris Laetitia: the Family is the mirror of the love of God

Each month, in honour of the year of the family, Vatican News service offers a video presenting the Pope's reflections illustrated with first-hand testimonies of families from across the world on the theme of the family. (4-minutes)

https://youtu.be/oSvOmJjkF_A - interesting response from a group of young catholics to the crazy promotion of the ‘gay-pride’ flag on a church in Vienna (3-minutes).

We wish you a blessed Month of Ma®y during which we will celebrate half a dozen Salesian Family feasts, beginning with Dominic Savio this week!

Camiel and François