Establish the Work of Our Hands

Here’s a newsflash from the world of medicine.

A Professor of surgery at London’s Imperial College, with the delightful name of Roger Kneebone, reports that he’s concerned about the increase in surgical students who lack certain vital skills.  Can you guess which ones?  Not diagnostic acumen or imaging analysis—many of these students ace their exams and blaze through their diagnostic computer programs.

But they don’t know how to sew.  And they aren’t too proficient in cutting, either—which, if you need to have your appendix out and patched up again, might be a skill you’d want your surgeon to have.

How does a bright young person get through medical school, all the way to the surgical theater, without learning how to stitch up a kitchen wound or dog bite?  How did she even get through kindergarten without learning how to cut along a straight line?*

We see a similar decline in the States, too: even kids who aren’t aiming at brain surgery for a career find themselves stymied when it comes to doing laundry or even folding clean clothes.

Cooking?  They can probably manage the microwave, but can they turn on an oven?

Changing the oil every 2000 miles?  Forget it.  In fact, they often do.

Yes, I’m pushing 70, so I’ve earned the right to rag on kids these days, just as my father used to rag on me for my taste in music and my mother for the way I wore my hair.  But this looming scandal in the medical field, like the shortage of skilled craftsmen here in the U.S., is more than a cultural trend.  It’s a symptom—one of many symptoms—of a shift in thinking that grew up with digital technology.  It’s the idea that we don’t really need our hands any more.  Just our fingers.  Manual labor is a thing of the past, meaning manual skills are no longer necessary.  Musicians, dancers, sculptors, and painters may follow their dream through the arts, but those who are not gifted in those pursuits can sit back and be entertained with a swipe of the screen.

This is a deeply gnostic belief, and it ties in with other popular contemporary illusions like transgenderism.  It’s why some school districts have eliminated shop and home ec classes, pared art, music, and drama programs and cut back on recess time.  We live in our heads, and “knowledge” is the only thing that matters. The future (supposedly) belongs to “knowledge workers,” not electricians and carpenters.

But no one lives in a virtual world, as much as some misfits and sociopaths may think they do.  There’s no real disconnect between brains, hands, feet, and that incorporeal being otherwise known as Soul.  God made us to be integrated beings, hand and mind working together.  What he has joined, no man can pull asunder without great damage to both.

To work in this way is a tremendous honor, because in doing so we imitate Creator.  God may not have “hands,” as we understand them, but he is so active in the world–making, unmaking, and recreating–that Bible writers can’t help but speak of “the hand of the Lord.” Even in an act as basic as turning over a row in the garden and planting seed, we follow in his metaphorical footsteps.  Angels, so far as we know, don’t make anything, or certainly no material thing.  That privilege belongs to us.

So put down the phone or tablet (as soon as you finish reading this!) and go make something.  Take a pottery class. Draw a tree.  Build a birdhouse, or paint one.   If nothing else, figure out how to thread a needle and sew on a button.  Apply the workings of your mind to the skill of your hands, then teach someone else to do the same.  Ask the Lord to establish the work of your hands (Ps. 90:17), and rejoice in following his creative, productive ways.

*In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis wrote of his own lack of ability to cut with scissors.  It was a strange disconnect between his very acute intellect and the parts of the brain that controlled small motor activity.  As a child, many a project begun hopefully had to be abandoned with tears.  He never learned to drive or do math, either, which suggests an interesting connection between manual dexterity and figures.  The Canadian writer Robertson Davies was the same way.