Working with our hands

I have some guys at my house today working on new flooring. It’s incredible to see the steps that go into removing a toilet! Watching the transformation of my place in this mini-remodel really has me thinking about how all of our work is a reflection of the nature of God – he creates, he maintains, he restores. Through our work, we do the same. Watching the old floors get ripped out and new paint go up on the walls, I am witnessing creation and restoration right in front of me.

As I have been pondering issues of faith and work lately, I have noticed people more – literally. I can sometimes be inside my own head as I walk through life. I get so lost in thought that people can startle me by just saying hi as they walk by. But lately I have been noticing all the people around me in an amazing variety of professions and being so thankful for their work, work that helps me and the rest of society to function.

It sucks how some work gets valued as more prestigious than other types of work, how we push people to climb the ladder right into work that is no longer fun for them. I often ask my staff members where they see themselves in 5 year. I’m embarrassed to admit that I expect them to say they want to be managing a team or overseeing bigger projects. On more than one occasion, the response has been that they love what they are doing and that they would never want my management job (that I happen to love).

The frustrating part is that some of my staff may become more and more expert at what they do, but it’s hard to “promote” them unless they do something different. And there is an expectation many times that that different thing is management – which is just so far off from their chosen crafts. I suspect that people in a variety of trades run into this same issue. Sometimes doing what we love and are designed to do is not enough in this society. And that is not cool.

An incredible article was recently written by Matthew Crawford entitled, “The case for working with your hands.”  I highly recommend taking time to read it.

A short excerpt to whet your appetite:

“High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.”