Work with your hands
The quiet faithful life
Paul gives an ambition that runs entirely against the grain of our age: make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands. In a culture that prizes the loud, the visible, and the impressive, Paul commends the quiet, the steady, the ordinary — to aspire, of all things, to a quiet and faithful life of honest work.
Notice that he calls it an ambition. We usually reserve ambition for the big and the noticed — to be great, to stand out, to make a name. Paul redirects ambition toward the unglamorous: a quiet life, faithfully lived, with one's own work done well and one's own affairs tended. There is a holiness in the ordinary, faithful life that our culture cannot see, fixated as it is on the remarkable.
This is a vital balance for the active life, lest we imagine that only the dramatic and visible counts. Most of the active life is not heroic mission or public ministry but the quiet faithfulness of ordinary work, done honestly, providing for ourselves and having something to share with those in need. The steady, unremarkable, faithful life — working with our hands, tending our responsibilities, quietly doing good — is itself a high calling. Have you despised the quiet, ordinary, faithful life, when God himself commends it?
“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands.”
— Paul, to the Thessalonians — 1 Thessalonians 4:11 (WEB)
Honor the quiet, faithful life of honest work as a high calling — redirecting your ambition from the loud and impressive to the steady and ordinary.
“Let him labor, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need.”
An age in love with the loud teaches us to despise the quiet, so faithful ordinary work starts to feel like a life too small to matter. The interior work is to take Paul's startling word — that a quiet, hardworking life is something to make our ambition — and to recognize the hidden holiness in the steady and unremarkable, where so much of a faithful life is actually spent.
This week, honor the quiet faithful life: do your ordinary work and tend your own responsibilities well and honestly, as a high calling, resisting the pull to despise the unremarkable or chase the visible and impressive.
Pride hungers for the noticed and the impressive, whispering that quiet, faithful work is beneath you and beneath note. But there is a holiness in the ordinary the spotlight cannot see — and a soul that makes the quiet life its ambition does good steadily, provides for others, and serves God right in the unremarkable place pride wanted abandoned.
Paul commends an ambition that cuts against everything our age prizes: aspire to a quiet life, mind your own affairs, and work with your hands. In a culture fixated on the loud, the visible, and the impressive, he calls us to value the quiet, steady, ordinary life of honest work — and strikingly, to make it our ambition, redirecting the very drive we usually reserve for greatness toward the unglamorous and faithful.
This is a crucial balance for the active life, lest we imagine only the dramatic and public counts. Most of the active life is not heroic mission but the quiet faithfulness of ordinary work, done honestly, providing for ourselves and having something to share with those in need. There is a holiness in the steady, unremarkable, faithful life that our culture cannot see. Before despising the ordinary as beneath you, consider that God himself commends it. Have you overlooked the quiet, faithful life of honest work as a high calling in its own right?
- Have I despised the quiet, ordinary life as beneath me?
- Do I reserve ambition only for the visible and impressive?
- Can I see the holiness in faithful, unremarkable work?
Lord, my age prizes the loud and impressive, and I despise the quiet, ordinary life. Yet you commend it. Redirect my ambition to a quiet, faithful life of honest work, and let me see the holiness in the steady and unremarkable, done for you. Amen.