I have a small booklet entitled Fathers’ Manual that contains many helpful prayers, including the following prayer for a Father’s Success in Work:
Prayer for a Father’s Success in Work
Lord God, and Father of us all, look down upon me and give me your abundant aid in my fatherly office.
Grant me the help to be successful in my job of providing adequately for the family entrusted to me.
Give me, as it pleases you, the health of body needed to carry out my work; and grant me grace to reconcile myself to any lack of health that may befall me.
Give me the mental and emotional health to be steady and judicious in my work and in my decisions — and grant me the proper balance to see the purpose of my job and not to expect it to give me more than it should.
Give me the good sense to know that for your blessings I must apply my talents with proper industry, alertness and fidelity, devoting myself faithfully to the carrying out of all that is rightly expected of me.
May I have the ideals and initiative to do a good job at all times, giving generously all that I should; but, at the same time, may I have the humility not to be ambitious beyond right reason.
May I always remember that no work is right or really successful which involves a violation of any of your laws.
Give me the help to provide adequately for the financial needs of my family and home and for the proper Catholic education of my children; but, at the same time, teach me the generosity that does not expect too much and is prepared to live cheerfully and economically within my means.
May I never be tempted to measure success in terms of money alone, and may I not look in envy at others who seem to have more than I.
May I not let absorption with my work keep me too much from my wife and children and from the proper fulfillment of my duties at home.
Above all, may my work never take me away from you. But may I always look on it rightly as a service of others and as a means of bringing a family close together with a modest security and sufficiency and see if as a means of uniting us all together in you.
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Taken from the book Fathers’ Manual: Prayers and Directives for Married Men by A. Francis Coomes, S.J. (William J. Hirten Co., Inc., Brooklyn, NY.)
