With Busy Hands, My Heart Whispers Prayers

I volunteered to provide a craft project for my 6-year-old son’s holiday party. It seemed like no big deal—we do crafts at home all the time—until I started to consider the logistics and the scale of the 30+ children who would be involved. The tying, cutting, and measuring I would usually just help with in the moment, now needed to be planned and completed ahead of time. Thus, it happened that I found myself at the kitchen island for much of my Saturday afternoon, engaged in the mimicry of true labor: punching holes in a multitude of paper plates, cutting yarn, tying a host of tiny knots.

“Is this a craft for the kids, or for you?” inquired my husband.

I agree with the sentiment. A century ago, I would have had skilled hands. I would have spent this afternoon spinning wool, sewing clothing, canning food. My time would have been too valuable to my family to waste in this frivolity. My labor would have mattered for more than creating entertainment for a class of children, enabling them to complete a project sure to be discarded in 30+ different garbage cans within the month. Is it good to spend my time this way, this time that God has given me?

And yet, is this any less real than the work I accept as good without questions? I constantly wash and fold the laundry so my family can have clean clothes to wear, clothes that stay clean for an hour or two. I clean the bathroom and straighten the house, only for both to be a mess again a few minutes later. None of the products of my work endure. What can I make that will last?

There is a story about Abba Paul, a monk who lived deep in the desert. The monks who lived closer to the city would weave baskets as they prayed, then sell them to help support themselves. Abba Paul couldn’t carry the baskets he made to the city, but he wove them anyway. Working with his hands gave his mind discipline to pray.

At the end of each year, he would burn all the baskets he had made and start again. He wove for the work itself, not for the product. He wove so he could pray.

There are those, like Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who can sit in stillness and silence and hear the voice of God. I have not this grace. When my body is still, my mind is moving, running through plans and questions, distracted, full of idle chatter. It is only when my body is busy that my mind can slow down and engage deeply. So I go for a walk when I want a real conversation with a friend, I knit while listening to my son practice his reading, and I finger the knots on a bracelet while talking to the Living God. And so, He has given me work to do with my hands.

“What gain has the worker from his toil?” asks the author of Ecclesiastes, “I have seen the business that God has given to the sons of men to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclessiastes 3:9-11). The gain is this: time to pray. If I can use every cut of my scissors, every click-clack of my hole punch, as an opportunity to pray for my son and his classmates, then this is good work that I do. This work is beautiful in its time even if the immediate products might as well be uselessly burned like Abba Paul’s baskets. The true product is prayer, and it is this that I must be busy with.

Not that I succeed very often. Most days, today included, my mind wanders aimlessly, and I make no effort to guide it back to prayer. But my goal should not be to find truer, longer-lasting work; my goal should be to use the work I have already been given to guide me in the true labor of purifying my soul by conversation with the Holy God.

Even so, I resolve that next time my son’s class has a party, I will sign up to bring napkins.