Isidore left home early for Holy Mass, as was his custom, and returned to the fields later than fellow workers. Whispers reached the landholder, Juan de Vargas, that the peasant’s piety was robbing the estate of labour. Vargas came to see for himself. There, between the furrows, he beheld Isidore recollected in prayer—yet the plough advanced, the earth turned, and the work outpaced the others. Tradition speaks of angelic ministers guiding the oxen, a sign that heaven is never debtor to those who put God first. The tale does not commend idleness; it blesses order: worship before work, and work suffused with prayer. The field becomes an oratory; the furrow, a psalm-line inscribed upon the soil. In such a life the sacred and the ordinary are not at war but in concord, and the day’s burden is light because it is borne within the Heart of Christ.
Prayer: Sacred Heart of Jesus, teach me to place worship before toil, that my labour may be sanctified and my time well ordered. Saint Isidore, pray for me.
Scripture: Matthew 6:33; Colossians 3:23.
