Fire Your Maid
Via Academite Becky’s Facebook status came “Benedict Us” from blog Our Great Adventure:
I work in a profession where many, if not most, of my tasks are cerebral. My hands and feet do the work of getting me to the chair and typing (or web surfing), but on a daily basis I use only a small fraction of their physical capacity. They are underused, subjected by my choice of profession to a certain enforced sloth, a subtle disobedience to the purposes for which they were created.
Refreshment of purpose, then, comes from the chores that I must do at home. Keeping a house and physical property requires that my hands and feet, and all of the seven hundred muscles in my body, use their gifts and talents. The projects do require thought and figuring, but the most redeeming part of them is the physical labor.
In work we discover that we need to pray. We humans are physical beings: our existence is wrapped up in our physicality. If we were not physical, we would not be who we are. Our thoughts, dreams, goals, perception of time, and understandings of God are led by the fact that we are beings in three-space. Labor, physical labor, by its nature requires us to engage three-space and therefore requires us to come to terms with who we are.
If you’re not just ready to wash the dishes, wash your clothes, or put up some shelving, then maybe you can play with your sewing machine and make something with fabric you’ve custom-designed.
Or git out the glue sticks and make a zine. Or put some red meat on a grill. Something, anything that doesn’t involve clicking here now.
