Do it with your might

The water is going lukewarm in the sink, and a pair of hands moves through it plate by plate, scraping, rinsing, stacking, the most unremarkable labor in the world. No crowd, no stage, no one watching. Down the street another set of hands answers an email, and another mends a fence rail that will sag again by autumn. This is the actual texture of most of a life, the unspectacular work that fills the hours between the few dramatic days. And it is into precisely this that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes drops a startling line. He has stared down the vanity of so much striving, watched grand ambitions blow away like vapor, and he lands somewhere surprisingly grounded: whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. Not whatever is impressive. Not whatever the world applauds. Whatever your hand finds, the dishes included. And generations later Paul lifts the same plain labor higher still, telling ordinary workers to do whatever they do heartily, as for the Lord and not for people. The hands in the cooling water have not changed their task. Something underneath the task has changed entirely.

Reconnection may disappoint a certain expectation. You might have hoped the far side of upheaval would hand you a grand new calling, a clean break from the ordinary, work that finally matched how much you have been through. More often it returns you to the very same tasks you always had: the dishes, the job, the daily round that does not look like much to anyone. But the why is transformed, and that changes everything without changing a single task. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, the Preacher says, and Paul adds the secret that turns ordinary labor sacred: do it heartily, as for the Lord and not for people. You do not need a platform for your work to matter to God. The wiping of a counter, done wholeheartedly and offered up to Him, is holy in a way no spectacular ministry is holy if it is done for applause. The remade life does not escape the ordinary. It learns to do the ordinary as worship, and discovers God was in the unspectacular hours all along.