“God is not pleased with the quantity of our work, but with the love with which we work” (St. Francis de Sales).
“Love covers a multitude of sins” (1 Pt 4:8) and increases the value of everything else.
Everything we do out of love for God acquires a special brilliance. As we serve people in the love of our Father, this brilliance will spread and glorify God.
We humans are in danger of deriving our value from the amount of work we do, as is often done in the world. Without questioning the fact that it is sometimes necessary to work intensely, the focus and value of what we do is different from our Father’s perspective, as St. Francis de Sales makes us understand.
This is because God, moved by love, has called into being all of His immense creation. It is inconceivable that it could be otherwise, and indeed this love is reflected in everything created and in what God does for us.
This is the “holy flavor” of our lives.
What we admire most about God is not His “efficiency” but the wisdom with which He created all things and, even more, how He accomplished the work of salvation.
The more we come to understand the love of our Father in sending His only begotten Son into the world for our salvation, the more we admire Him, worship Him, and allow ourselves to be seduced by His love. “Great and marvelous are thy deeds”, the victors over the beast sing to God in the book of Revelation (15:2-3).
When our Father sees that we do everything out of love for Him and that our works thus acquire that “holy flavor”, He is pleased with us because we have grasped the essential.