honest work

"Where would you expect to find the body of Christ, and what would you expect to find it doing?

For the greater part of His life, Jesus lived as a working man. He was apprenticed in a joiner's yard and, it may be inferred, became on Joseph's death, the breadwinner for a household of at least eight persons. For the greater part of His life, the body of Christ was exercised in the common processes of industry.

• Do you think He was out to make a fortune in those years?
• Do you think slipshod work came out of that shop? Badly mortised joints or flaws filled in with putty?
• Do you think that His apprentices were overworked or underpaid?
• Do you think that He treated them as impersonal 'hands'?

The church is called to be the Body of Christ in industry. The term 'church worker' is apt to call up a picture of the Sunday school teacher or the collector for foreign missions, and no one who knows the Church from the inside will slight their important services. But there is a kind of Church worker for whom our age even more urgently calls, and on whom the life and example of Christ set more immediately the seal of discipleship. The man who, to the glory of God and for the good of his fellows, does honest work for the everyday sort. The man who, in the context of that work, is being delivered, reach after reach, from the deep egotism of human nature. The man behind the counter, or at the loom, or in the manager's office, or on the University rostrum, who sees his daily life, and lives it, not as a drudgery, but as a devotion...a thing offered and his contribution to God's plan of building a wholesome communal life upon the earth. These are the lives which all along have kept society sane and sweet...have kept it from lapsing altogether into savagery. These are Christ's Church on one great and permanent level of its manifold life. These are members of the body of the Carpenter of Nazareth." ~A.C. Craig