An ordinary day in my life revolves around a core of technology. While interacting with actual human beings in a virtual way, my working and waking hours are often spent answering e-mails, browsing webpages, articles or books on my iPad, talking on my iPhone, or videoconferencing with people half a continent away. I take pictures and video with my digital devices and send tweets and posts to Facebook while writing manuscripts, policies, or correspondence at my computer keyboard. My ordinary life is just that, ordinary. There is nothing unique about my ordinary life because it is also the ordinary life of billions of people in this second decade of the twenty-first century who now work in environments that require technological sophistication with its continual evolution and demanding learning curve.
But it is far from an ordinary day in my life thirty years ago, when my interactions with electronic technology were limited to listening to a transistor radio, putting a cassette tape in a stereo, or playing “Pong” on a black and white video screen. Ordinary people seldom encountered sophisticated technology in those days, and those encounters were often fraught with suspicion. If you are old enough, you remember how computers were blamed for everything back in the day. If there was a mistake in billing or business, a computer was generally faulted—not a pc, but an impersonal, monstrous machine that inhabited some corporate cave far from the world of real, ordinary people. Things have changed. Today you’d be hard pressed to convince the throngs of people lined up to spend their dollars at an Apple store that the cleanly displayed devices will bring them nothing but trouble.
Luddites do not receive much sympathy from me. Personally, I generally have been quick to embrace technological change, choosing to believe the benefits outweigh the challenges in the long run. I must admit it took me a while to eliminate my Smith Corona typewriter from my personal inventory, but after my first PC back in 1990, I decided to never turn back to the old ways of communication or putting words on paper. Nor do I subscribe to various conspiracy theories about the inherent slippery slope of technology. What could be used for evil, also could offer generous rewards if used properly.
Although our ordinary lives look far different from the ordinary lives of people a generation or two ago, much remains the same. While technology has improved the methods, we still must wash our clothes, prepare our food, earn a living, travel to our destinations, and learn to get along, just like people have done for centuries. At the end of the day, we still lay down our tired bodies to sleep, while our troubled minds reflect many of the same questions our ancestors pondered about truth, love, family, purpose, and meaning.
In our sophisticated, technologically empowered scientific world, it may seem irrelevant to reflect on the life of a humble carpenter from a small Middle Eastern village who lived 2,000 years ago. But does our scientific acumen and technological prowess really trump those questions we ponder as we lie in our beds with the lights out while the iPhone and iPad are charging in silent mode? Does it matter what I believe about Jesus Christ? Dallas Willard answers that question in The Divine Conspiracy by explaining, “He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings.”
Over the past year I’ve returned several times to a small recent volume by Matthew B. Crawford titled, Shop Class as Soulcraft. In it he laments the decline of shop or industrial arts classes in public education. He also notes the dismaying fact that our growing dependence upon technology makes it virtually impossible for the average person to actually understand how the devices that we depend upon for our ordinary existence work, let alone how to repair them if they fail us. That makes us more and more dependent upon experts to keep our ordinary lives moving along.
For example, when I look under the hood of my 2009 model Honda, little besides checking the oil makes much sense to me. Compare that to my old ’55 Chevy pickup, where I dissembled and repaired almost every component pertaining to the engine, transmission, and drive train with ordinary tools found in my toolbox. I still have the tools and toolbox, but the sophisticated technology of today’s automobile makes them relics without the knowledge of how the computers and onboard electronics actually make everything mechanical work.
At the beginning of the book Crawford quotes an unknown shop teacher: “In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through their hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”
Thus, he sounds a nostalgic chord by reminding me of the importance of working with your hands and using hand tools—enduring lessons I learned in junior high shop class. Our teacher, Sandy Brown, provided a daily illustration of the importance of shop safety as we observed the missing digits from his always animated hands, fingers lost through careless interactions with a power saw blade in his younger, pre-teacher days.
Besides safety concerns, he instilled in me the importance of creating a plan of procedure, a list of materials, a budget, and using the right tool for the right job. In short, shop class helped prepare me for the most fundamental and practical components of living an ordinary life. As I work in my shop today, I am reminded of those practical lessons and their timeless application to transform ordinary work into accomplished works of art.
I wonder what it would be like to see a door, shelf, or table built by Jesus Christ? How did the Creator of the universe make his mark of master craftsmanship upon a simple piece of furniture? Did it stand out from the work of all others, or did it appear ordinary? What did an ordinary day in his life look like as he interacted with customers, raw materials, and the tools of the trade? Did he take pride in his work? Did he think of just snapping his fingers to create a modern, twenty-first century shop with all the latest machinery, or better yet, just order a few angels to do the work? Such speculation aside, the important lesson of the incarnation remains that God himself so valued simple, creative, and ordinary work that he took no shortcuts in creating simple structures and furnishings, using equally simple tools of the first century.
In contrast, my days are filled with the busyness that technology affords to accomplish a myriad of tasks. Perhaps it is just the nature of my work with human beings in the church world, but at the end of the day I am sometimes hard pressed to see any tangible results from my efforts. Without an underlying eternal purpose to my activities for perspective, my soul is left void of an emotional sense of worth or genuine accomplishment.
Yet I nostalgically remember a simpler era, when as a young laborer working in construction or in a sawmill I could see the tangible results of a job well done, leaving me emotionally satisfied. My own father was both a farmer and a roofer. Both occupations offered opportunities to observe the tangible results of manual labor. You could see it in the rows of a crop, or in the rows of chicken houses and barns he built with his own hands. As we drove down the main street of our small town, he would point out the houses and businesses that bore his mark of craftsmanship as their crown.
Perhaps what is missing today is that balance that leverages the best parts of technology with the accomplishment of a satisfied soul. For me, Jesus Christ helps bridge that gap. Our most stunning advances in technology and science are no surprise to him. When I lay down to rest at night, I can do so with the sense that there is a purpose in it all, and while I don’t have all the answers to all the questions, I do know the One who does, and that makes all the difference.
As a carpenter, Jesus no doubt crafted many wooden ox yokes, enabling farmers of the day to have the best current technology could offer as they used their oxen to plow. Humble, ordinary objects, and humble, ordinary work, that’s what it was. And that makes his invitation in Matthew 11:28-29 even more significant, as he offered his own yoke, normally used to bear a burden of work, to provide rest for your soul—your thoughts, decisions, and emotions. The irony of using a metaphor for work as a symbol for rest provides a lesson for technologically advanced, but soul weary human beings today. His invitation still stands, “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matthew 11:28-29 NKJV)
©2011 Don Detrick
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