My Hands Needed Something To Do

It was the hands first.

Not the plant. The plant came second, and it was more or less accidental. What happened first was that you stopped working and your hands did not stop, and for about three months they had nothing at all to do and they made that very clear.

And then one afternoon you watered something, and there was about ninety seconds where they were occupied.

And you have been doing it since, and you have a word for it in your own head, and the word is pathetic.

So that is where this starts, and it is not with the plant.

The word is wrong and it is doing a great deal of damage.

And it is not a word anybody else has used about you. Nobody has said it, nobody has implied it, and if you told your wife she would look at you as though you had lost your mind. It arrived on its own, from inside, at some point in the last three months, and it has been in service ever since.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do

Ecclesiastes has a line about work that is aimed at exactly this, and the verb in it is the point.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. (Ecclesiastes 9:10, King James Version)

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do.

You are being described exactly as you are, and a hand that goes looking and finds something has never once been the hand of a man wasting himself. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has had ninety seconds of occupation this afternoon.

Look at the verb. Findeth.

Not: whatsoever thy hand is assigned. Not: whatsoever befits a man of your experience. Findeth, which assumes a hand that is out looking, which is exactly what yours has been doing for three months.

And the instruction that follows is not to find something better. It is to do that thing with your might, whatever the thing turned out to be.

You were never asked to find work worthy of you, and the size of what a hand finds has never once been part of that instruction. The Spirit of God is what makes that reach a man who has stopped working, and Ecclesiastes 9 is where the finding is written down.

What the word pathetic is doing

Now the practical half, and it is about the word rather than the watering.

It gets applied to a ninety second act because of what preceded it. Forty years of work with weight in it, and now a man with a plastic can in a kitchen, and the contrast produces the word automatically and it produces it every single time.

You have a word arriving on its own that you never sat down and agreed to, and a name that shows up by reflex has never once been a finding about anybody. Ecclesiastes 9:10 measures by the might in the work, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an unagreed word off a man.

But the word is not describing the act. It is describing the drop, and a drop is not a thing that can be measured by looking at where you have landed.

You are naming the distance and calling it the destination, and no act has ever once been small because of what came before it. What is written in Ecclesiastes 9:10 measures by the might put into it and not by the scale of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a drop from a destination.

And here is what is actually happening in those ninety seconds, which is worth being precise about.

A pair of hands that spent four decades being useful have found something useful to do. Not something that resembles usefulness. Something that is genuinely useful, because a plant that is not watered dies and that one has not.

That is not a substitute for work. It is work, at the only scale currently available, done by a man who is still a man who does things.

You have hands that are still doing what they have always done, and the scale they are doing it at has never once changed what they are. The Spirit of God is the one who says that plainly, and Ecclesiastes 9 is the ground under the finding.

Both hands, and say nothing

So here is the instruction, and the first part is physical and the second part is about your mouth.

Water it today with both hands on the can.

Not one hand, casually, on the way past. Both hands, the way a man carries something. It will feel slightly absurd and it is not absurd, because two hands on a task is what a body does when the task is being taken seriously, and your body knows that even if your head is busy calling it pathetic.

And then afterward, do not call it anything. No word. Not pathetic, and not a better word either. Do not upgrade it to purposeful or meaningful or any of that. Do the thing and go and do something else without naming it. The naming is what has been doing the damage, and a better name would still be a naming.

You are able to do a thing and leave it unnamed, and an unlabeled act has never once been an act you failed to understand. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says do it with thy might and offers no commentary afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man holding a can in both hands in a quiet house.