The Hands

The apostle sets before the Thessalonians an ambition that would strike the world as no ambition at all. That ye study to be quiet, he writes, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands. Study to be quiet. Be ambitious, that is, to be still, to make it your aim and your striving not to rise and be seen but to be quiet, to mind your own affairs, and to labor honestly with your own hands. In an age restless for greatness, this is a strange and quieting word, that the mark of the Christian should be a quiet, industrious, unmeddling life, the dignity of the ordinary working hand.

And Paul practiced what he preached, for though he was an apostle, with every right to be supported, he labored night and day with his own hands at the making of tents, that he might not be a burden to any. The greatest missionary of the age was also a tradesman who worked with his hands, and saw no contradiction in it, and even boasted of it. The hands that wrote the epistles also stitched the leather. There is no shame in honest labor, and no height of calling that lifts a man above the dignity of working with his own hands.

THE SANCTITY OF THE ORDINARY

Those who have most seriously sought God have often bound prayer and manual labor together, and were right to do so. Work is not a distraction from the spiritual life but a part of it, a school of humility and a guard for the soul. Remember that God set the man in the garden to dress it and to keep it before ever sin entered the world; labor was given before the fall, and is no part of the curse. The curse added the sweat and the thorn and the toil, but the work itself was a gift, a share in the ordering of God’s good world, and it remains a gift still, dignified by its origin and by the Lord who himself worked at a carpenter’s bench for most of his years on earth.

This is why the ordinary task, done well and offered to God, is not beneath the spiritual life but woven into it. The hands may be busy at the plainest work while the heart is lifted to God, and the two do not compete. Indeed the steady occupation of the hands has always been a help to the praying soul, keeping the body ordered and the mind from the idleness in which temptation breeds. The idle hand is the tempter’s workshop, but the hand at honest labor, with the heart at prayer, is a fortress. The solitary who works is guarded by his work, and the acedia that assaults the idle finds little foothold in a life of quiet, prayerful industry.

WORK AS PRAYER

The apostle gives the secret that turns the plainest labor into worship. Whatsoever ye do, he says, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. Whatsoever ye do. Not only the tasks we count sacred, but the commonest work of the commonest day, the washing and the mending and the digging, done heartily as to the Lord, becomes an offering, a prayer made with the hands. The work is not sanctified by being important but by being offered, and the humblest labor lifted to God is worth more than the grandest done for the eyes of men. A floor swept for the Lord is holier than a sermon preached for oneself.

This means the whole ordinary day may be made a continual prayer, not by adding religious words to it but by offering its plain work to God. The hands labor, and the offering of that labor is itself a lifting of the heart, so that a man may pray without ceasing not by ceasing to work but by working as unto the Lord. The kitchen becomes a chapel and the workbench an altar, not because the tasks have changed but because they are offered, and the God who receives the offering is as truly present among the pots as in the sanctuary.

WORKING WITH QUIETNESS

Paul had to write to this same church again, more sharply, for some among them had taken a false spirituality as an excuse for idleness, working not at all, and becoming busybodies. If any would not work, he said, neither should he eat, and he commanded that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread. There is a rebuke here for every age that dresses up its idleness in spiritual clothes, that thinks itself too heavenly for honest labor and so becomes a burden and a meddler. The restless idler who will not work but has much to say of everyone else’s business is the very opposite of the quiet, laboring soul Paul commends. True spirituality does not excuse a man from the plain duty of working with his own hands. It sends him to it with a will.

For labor is a humbling thing, and its humbling is part of its good. To work with the hands, to do the ordinary and unglamorous task day after day, keeps a soul from the pride that idleness and self-importance breed. The apostle even ties honest labor to the giving of alms, that a man should labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth. The working hand becomes the giving hand. The quiet industry that keeps a man humble also fills his hand with something to share, so that his labor blesses not only himself but the poor at his door.

ESTABLISH THE WORK

Moses, in the psalm that grieves over the brevity of human life, how our years are spent as a tale that is told, ends not in despair but in a prayer for the work of our hands. Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, he prays, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. He says it twice, as one who feels how frail and fleeting our labor is, how soon the hands that did it are dust and the work forgotten, and who therefore pleads that God would give it a permanence it could never have of itself. The prayer admits the smallness of what we do, and asks the great God to make it stand.

For left to itself the work of our hands is a passing thing. We labor, and the labor is undone; we build, and the building crumbles; we spend our strength on tasks that the next season sweeps away, and if that were all, the working life would be a kind of despair, a pouring of ourselves into sand. But the prayer changes everything. Offered to God and blessed by him, the work of our hands is established, given a meaning and a permanence that our own effort could never secure, taken up into a purpose larger than the task and longer than our lives.

This is the answer to the ache of insignificance that haunts the ordinary worker, the sense that our small daily labors amount to nothing and vanish as we do. They do vanish, if they are only ours. But offered to God, established by him, the humblest faithful work is not lost. He remembers what men forget, and he can make the sweeping of a floor or the raising of a child or the keeping of a trade to stand in his purposes when the empires that despised such small labors have crumbled. What is done for God, however small, he establishes, and what he establishes, endures.

And the measure he asks is not greatness but faithfulness in little. Thou hast been faithful over a few things, the Lord will say to his servants, and it is enough for the welcome into his joy. He does not require that our hands do great things, only that they do their few things faithfully, as unto him. So the ordinary working life, offered daily to God and asking him to establish it, is not a small and meaningless thing but a faithful stewardship of the few things committed to us, which the Lord receives and blesses and makes to stand.

So do not despise the ordinary work of your hands, nor long to be lifted above it into some grander and more visible service. Study to be quiet. Do your own business, and work with your own hands, and do it heartily as to the Lord, and let the plain labor of your days be a prayer made with the body while the heart is lifted to God. Ask him, as the psalmist did, to establish the work of your hands, and he will, for the God who worked at a carpenter’s bench does not despise the working hand, but receives its offering, and blesses it, and makes the quiet, laboring, unmeddling life into a life that pleases him. Study to be quiet, and to work with your own hands.