Cubicle Dweller Builds Garden Box

On 1 Thessalonians 4:11 and a homestead deferred

My wife and I never got to taste the harvest from our first garden. The spring when we started it, now nearly five years ago, we lived in a faded yellow house in a small town beneath a towering stretch of the Rocky Mountains. We had big, if unoriginal, plans for our third-of-an-acre: growing our own vegetables and raising chickens for eggs. We’d learned that a few of our trees would offer an annual plum harvest too.

As the last snow of the season melted off, I sliced my shovel under the sod and lifted, revealing the dark earth beneath. Angling the blade nearly flat, I left as much dirt in place as I could. Eventually, I’d carved out a twenty-by-twenty plot that faced the jagged granite horizon to the east.

This wasn’t the only soil beneath those peaks that we had planned to nurture. A supporting role in a nearby church plant had originally drawn us to the area.

And then that summer, just as green shoots began to break through in both gardens, we discovered that it was already time to move on.

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This week, the temperature in our corner of the Midwest fell to zero with the wind chill. Icy snow now covers the ground here, as it does across much of the country. I’m in the garage, enjoying the smell of cedar and temperatures that are downright balmy compared to those beyond the retractable vinyl door.

I sink another screw into the raised planter bed that I’m building. It’s a simple project, but still a satisfying one. From a jumbled pile of boards that lay on the floor, something now stands on its own. Out of raw materials, a useful result. I’m almost finished. A blast of wind rattles the garage door, a reminder that there’s no real urgency. It’ll be months before anything can be planted.

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Even for the nimble-tongued, a chapter-and-verse reference to “1 Thessalonians 4:11” is a mouthful. It weighs in at a stout ten syllables. The oft-cited “John 3:16,” by comparison, takes just four.

And while this verse from Thessalonians offers a reminder needed in our day, I don’t expect to see it on a coffee mug anytime soon. Its cumbersome length isn’t even the main obstacle to it catching on. The real hurdle is what it says:

Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you. (1 Thessalonians 4:11)

I brought this verse up in a recent post called “Will the Amish Get the Last Laugh?” There, I pointed out that in our modern world, quiet living is seen strictly as a personal choice, and the temptation to peer into others’ business has been monetized (thanks, social media). So most will dismiss this verse as irrelevant to modern life before even getting to the part about working with your hands.

But here’s the thing. Bringing some kind of practical, physical work into your life is exactly what a lot of people need right now. I’m not saying you have to give up your hard-won career in a cubicle. I have a desk job too. But it’s worth making time to use your hands to shape, to form, to build. The Maker made us to be makers too.

Interestingly, the well-known call to “pray without ceasing”¹ is also in 1 Thessalonians. It comes roughly a chapter after the “work with your hands” verse, and there’s likely no direct connection. But the two ideas do pair well. With so-called knowledge work, your brain is constantly taking in or spitting out information. With your verbal processing circuits already overloaded, sustaining what we usually think of as prayer is nearly impossible. But with physical work, your mind, while often sharply focused, isn’t log-jammed with words and numbers. Here, it’s much more attainable to literally pray without ceasing.

And it’s one thing if you have to endure information overload to earn a living. But most of us willingly saturate our minds with digital messages in our free time. Often, we start doing this to ourselves as soon as we have an idle moment.

Choose the real world over the virtual haze. Start small. Pick a physical task you enjoy, or just tackle something that needs doing. As you go along, invite the Lord to meet you there. Just do the work and talk to him. You don’t need to worry about what might or might not grow out of it in the long run.

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Plans, as my wife and I learned five years ago, don’t always pan out anyway. For a short time, we owned that house where we started the garden. Back then, without kids yet, we talked about raising a family in that town. We thought that the church plant we were helping with might become a long-term ministry for us.

But then, a church about fifty miles away called on us. A head injury had forced their long-time pastor to dial back his role, leaving needs unfilled. Our friends at the church plant agreed that the other church needed our help more. They laid hands on us and prayed. We trusted God and left our garden behind.

We’ve never struggled with doubts about the decision. And viewed from today’s vantage point, half a decade, three kids, and a handful of house moves later, that particular juncture doesn’t seem as significant as it did at the time. Since that time, the Lord has since taken us in a direction we couldn’t have anticipated then. We now live thousands of miles from that little mountain town. If my wife and I get to reminiscing, we can come up with plenty that we miss. But overall, we’re very grateful to be right where we are. Yet building the planter box still brings up some disappointment for me. That’s because we still want to have a garden. And now we can picture our kids scurrying out to collect the eggs. But these days we rent half of a duplex. The yard isn’t ours to dig up, much less to set chickens loose in.

So the raised cedar bed will have to do for now.

Work with your hands, as we instructed you.

Trust, pray, work, wait, repeat.

1. 1 Thessalonians 5:17