The Work of our Hands

How can I put this delicately?

The daily work of my hands leave my hands smelling of hog feces. The smell is impossible to completely rid myself. I’ve showered and scrubbed yet even now as I sit clean and washed and pecking away at my MacBook I catch a whiff of something amiss. I lift my hands to my face. I inhale. There is no doubt about it. They smell like manure.

That odor can smell as romance for a time. We invite apprentices into the life of our farm each year as a part of our Prairie Apprenticeship Program and to some folks the smell and squish of pig poop can prompt a sort of "I’m a Farmer" kind of moment. It’s as if the smell were incense wafting in from a Wendell Berry novel carrying with it a sense of venerable work, unsullied nativeness, and untarnished community life. But soon enough anyone enlisted to scoop hog stool will come to smell it for what it is and after they’re done and washed in the evening their hands will still smell of feces.

And yet the work of the farm must go on. My alarm goes off at 5:15 each morning. My hands smell. My back and feet ache in the most un-romantic sort of way. I head out to do chores. Pens need scooped. Piglets need castrated. Barns need washed. But to enter into this larger and significant theological conversation on faith and work I need not seek to mentally sanitize this day’s poop-scooping activities in order to meet a certain theological rubric of urbane culture making. The work I’m going to do this day is hard, it is smelly, and it will be completely unheralded. But it is good.

This is not work that will "change the world," but to play off of James Davidson Hunter’s prescription, what I’m called to is a faithful practice. I won’t see the end to much of my work but I am called to it nonetheless. I am in on a long-term project of making a place beautiful. Not frilly and pretty. But a robust and durable beauty that wades into the ambiguity that is farm work amid the thorns and thistles. My poop scooping labor will – over a long, long time – build the fertility of my farm as I return it to the soil. And that will be beautiful. My day-in, day-out faithful practice of cleaning out hog pens will contribute to the health and well-being of my hog herd. This work of mine will not give me cultural weight or financial wealth. But it is aimed at a wealth of durable beauty called shalom.

-pj