My Father’s Hands: Touching God through Daily Work

As days of the week go, Sunday stands out from the rest in my memories of childhood. Not because it was the day for church, but because it was the one day of the week my father wore a suit. I always thought he looked pretty good on Sundays. As the youngest I often sat next to dad during the morning service. Sermons seemed to go on for the longest time, so I passed the time by playing with his hands. Dad’s hands were always one of my favourite things about him. They were big and callused. Underneath dad’s nails was always black. We had one of those plastic nailbrushes sitting beside the bathroom sink. Every Sunday before church dad would stand over the sink vigorously scrubbing, but the black grease was deeply imbedded. No matter how hard he scrubbed, it was there to stay.

My father is a turner-and-fitter by trade. When I was just one year old, my parents moved off the family dairy farm in the Gippsland. Financially they couldn’t make it anymore. I am one of six sons. With a large family to care for, my parents decided that dad should look for work in the factories of an industrial suburb on the southern edge of Melbourne. For the next twenty years, six days a week, I awoke to the familiar sound of the front door closing as my father headed off to work for another day. I understood very little then of the responsibility that dad had carried as he walked out the door each morning. I understood even less the price he had to pay to meet that responsibility. Supporting a large family on a tradesman’s wage made overtime essential. He could never afford the luxury of dwelling upon his own sense of fulfilment or need for personal advancement. Work was simply a necessity; it had to be done. The factories were cold, noisy and impersonal. The work was hard, repetitious and dirty, and the hours long. He would come homed tired, strained and smelling of the factory. He was always glad to be home. Work could be forgotten until morning.

Sundays were different though. My dad was an important man in the church. He served as a deacon and an elder for all the years I can remember. In those days, his love, gentleness, and compassion drew respect from his fellow church members and his own family. In all matters of concern in the church, he was called upon for his wisdom. He was kept busy on boards and committees, and spent countless evenings visiting, pastoring and praying. In church he was somebody!

Despite of all of this, no one in the church seemed to notice my dad’s hands. To my knowledge, nobody ever asked him why his nails were constantly black. It never seemed to matter in this context who my dad was outside the church. His value—indeed his spirituality—was always measured by who he was in the church. It was as though my dad lived in two different worlds.　

It is simply not right that people like my father have had to live life in two worlds with no apparent connection, deprived of the resources and encouragement to discover the presence and purposes of God in that which has taken up so much of life. The question that I wish to address here is simply this: How is it that we can ‘touch God’ in our daily work?

In our search for a realistic spirituality of work—a daily ‘touching of God’ in and through our labours—there are a number of ‘disciplines’ that are at one and the same time important to our understanding of Christian experience and present in our work.

1. Work as Creation

In Gen. 1:28, God blesses humankind with the words, “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” Unfortunately, the English word ‘subdue’ carries with it some negative connotations. To subdue most often infers domination, control, or the ‘breaking’ of something into submission. All this sounds anything but creative. In contrast, the Hebrew word from which it comes is kabhash, which literally means ‘to knead’ or ‘to tread.’ Given my professional background as a chef, I immediately think of kneading bread or treading grapes, activities fundamental to the creation of these two culinary staples, and both wonderfully creative.

Seasoned bread makers will know that successful baking relies upon one’s skill to work with yeast, a notoriously temperamental ingredient. One soon learns that kneading has little to do with domination and control, as though one can beat the bread dough into submission. Rather, it is about working with the basic ingredients provided by God and gently, slowly and skillfully bringing those ingredients to their full potential. It seems to me that at it best, this is what much of our work is about. Think of a musician, a carpenter, a teacher, a parent, a metal worker, a gardener, an architect. Each one takes basic ingredients created by God—be they music, wood, metal, seeds and plants, even a human mind—and through various means endeavour to work those elements to their full potential. In this sense, as those commanded to subdue the earth, we are called to be co-creators with God.

2. Work as Providence

The God of the bible is not one who creates and walks away, but one who stays intimately connected with the creation. That God is Provider is not simply descriptive of a role or function that God fulfils. Rather, it speaks of God’s character and being.

As workers created in the image of God, not only are we co-creators, we are co-providers. Providing is a God ordained responsibility. In light of this, it seems to me that this business of working to provide for those who are dependent upon us is an activity entirely underrated. Too often the response, “I just work to earn a living” is meant to indicate that the activity is a near-meaningless one as far as spiritual significance is concerned. But this is not so. Our call to co-provision is gathered up in the ‘image’ that we share with God. To provide is not merely an activity we engage by necessity; it is an expression of our God-likeness.

3. Work as Community

Christians profess faith in a God encountered in community. The call to conversion is a call to enter into the fellowship of that community nature of God—the ‘body of Christ’, the ‘household of God’—for it is in relationship with those around us that God is embodied. Our response to God and our response to those around us are indivisible.

It follows from this that anywhere we are about nurturing human community, we nurture a place or context of potential divine encounter. In some cases, the work of community building is explicit to a role or task. Urban planners, teachers, community workers, and caf? proprietors all have community making as an important activity in their job description (or at least they should have). For others, the work of nurturing community is more a choice to be made in the way one works and relates than it is a task on the official to-do list. Either way, community nurture is an intentional outworking of Christian commitment.

4. Work as Service

One of the more defining images of the spirituality of Jesus is provided in John 13, the account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. With Jesus as our model, it is not difficult to see the difference between the profit-driven nature of ‘customer service’ in the contemporary workplace, and the very humbling, selfless, and routine embodiment of grace evident in the act of foot washing. Perhaps there is a place for Christians working in ‘service’ industries to reclaim the notion of service as virtue rather than a profit motivated strategy.

When I look for similar examples today of this selfless and routine act of service, it is hard to go past the image of my father. In a very real sense, by walking out that front door every morning to go to work, my father served me, routinely, humbly, and selflessly. Why did he work? In large part, he worked for me. Six days a week, for 20 years, my father took off his outer garments, knelt down before me and washed my feet. In assessing my father’s actions in this way, I am not suggesting that he felt every morning with a divinely inspired sense of purpose, or that there was some stream of heavenly light that circled his head as he stood at his lathe. No, the service of foot washing is not like that. It is an ordinary, routine, dirty, domestic task. Tomorrow it will need to be done again, and again. Surely this is, in part at least, the real test of service as Jesus envisioned it.

5. Work as Perseverance

For a significant number of people, work is simply a necessity. Regardless of its nature, outcomes, or alignment with personal gifts or interests, it is a matter of financial survival. It is much more challenging to find the ‘God-connections’ for those engaged in the more menial and ‘unskilled’ aspects of work.

Perhaps we must look for signs of ‘the Spirit’ more in the character or attitudes that we bring to a task than in the nature of the task itself. One of the character traits valued in the New Testament is perseverance. In Romans 5:3-4, the writer notes that “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” Perseverance is an important link in the ‘chain’ of spiritual maturity. It speaks of our faithfulness to God and to those around us. It mirrors the image of God—the one whose persevering grace holds human existence together and points us confidently and persistently to the future.

Daily work—most especially work that is routine, mundane or difficult—demands perseverance in great measure. When we persevere in difficult or tedious circumstances for a greater good, we touch the character and heart of God.

6. Work as Grace

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” There is a principle at work here that applies much more broadly than within intimate relationships. Think of work. It is often a gift that we do not fully appreciate until we are without it.

Sociologically and psychologically, we are defined today by our ability to provide, produce and purchase. To be without work is be significantly diminished in these abilities and therefore diminished in our sense of self-worth and the worth attributed to us by mainstream society. From a Christian perspective, there is much that should be questioned and challenged in these measurements of human worth. However, it must also be acknowledged that the needs to produce and provide are, in large measure, God-given. To be invited into the co-creation and co-providence of God through human work is a part of the on-going and gracious activity of God.

7. Work as Celebration

In the creation story, there is clearly a time when God steps back from the work of creation and celebrates the results: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). Celebration is essential to our spirituality for it is time given over exclusively to contemplating, assessing and enjoying the real worth of who we are and what we have in God.

Celebration is always seasonal and occasional. The depth of celebration is directly proportional to the effort or struggle extended in working forward the goal. Think of the therapist who meets week after week with a struggling client: the tears, the anger, the ups and downs, 2 steps forward, 3 steps backward. Finally, maybe months or even years later, she watches her client walk out the door for the last time, significantly more whole and stable than before. In so many expressions of work there come moments when we can say with God, “It is good.” Such moments bring to us perspective and hope. They remind us who we are and what we are created for.

8. Work as Prayer

“To work is to pray.” So said the monastics of some five centuries ago. As lovely as it sounds, there are not too many workplaces that look anything like this.

However, before we dismiss this business of work as prayer outright, we need to consider again the New Testament directive in Romans 12:1-2: “Therefore, I urge you, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.” Similarly, in Colossians 3:23-24: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord … it is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Though it sounds terribly clich?d, it is clear from these two directives that life is potentially a prayer. By offering up to God who we are in our fullness and completeness as human beings, everything that issues from our hands, hearts, and imaginations is sanctified. It is prayer. In all its ordinariness, messiness, and momentariness, we find the sacred and the eternal. It is not about being transported to some spiritual plane where we are constantly attuned to the Spirit around us. It is simply going about our daily routines with the confidence that God is present—listening, speaking, celebrating, even grieving.

My list is not complete. But in it all, I want to communicate this: I love my father’s hands. Although they no longer seem quite as big as they once did, they still retain the obvious signs of many years of hard work. The black under dad’s nails had faded a little now. But no matter how many years go by, his hands will always be those of a worker. They say that when we gather in heaven, Jesus will still bear the scars of the nails in his hands; an eternal sign of the sacrifice made on our behalf. It is my hunch that when my dad lifts his hands in worship on that day, God will see his blackened nails and smile.