The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...
Genesis 2:15, Exodus 20:15, Matthew 25:14-30, John 10:10, Psalm 139:13-14, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
There’s a charming story about a little boy who made a gingerbread man. He poured his heart into crafting it, carefully decorating it with candy eyes and a cheerful smile. It was his creation, and he ...
I love watching young boys and girls build things with Legos. Their small, creative masterpieces cannot help but reflect their image-bearing nature and remind us we were all made to make things. When ...
While we are now surrounded by a never-ending number of pixels with our smartphones, there once was a time where the process of developing photographs took something much more significant than pointin...
Have you ever heard of a Stradivarius violin? It’s the gold standard of violins—instantly recognizable and famously expensive. These aren’t $29.95 instruments. One sold for $1 million, another for $4 ...
Psalm 127:1, Matthew 25:23, Luke 16:10, Ecclesiastes 9:10, Proverbs 22:29, 1 Corinthians 3:13-14, Galatians 6:7
An elderly master carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family. He w...
Luke 12:49, Malachi 3:2, Zechariah 13:9, Isaiah 48:10, Proverbs 17:3, Psalm 66:10-12, 1 Peter 1:7
Refiner’s fires are used on precious metals, not for mundane elements. The refiner must hold the metal in the hottest part of the fire in order to burn off all the impurities, thus retrieving a pure...
Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...
In the furniture industry of the 1920s, the machines of most factories were not run by electric motors but by pulleys from a central drive shaft. The millwright was the person on whom the entire activ...
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...
Sometime in the last decade or so I started hearing the phrase “all that good stuff.” I think it happened first when I was ordering dinner at a restaurant. The waitress summarized the menu briefly, en...
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. Especially strong thinking powers (...
Every creator, from a child with Play-Doh to Michelangelo, learns that creation involves a kind of self-limiting. You produce something that did not exist before, yes, but only by ruling out other opt...
The recognition of humanity's flawed nature is not exclusive to Christianity. Aristotle, in his work Ethics , compares human nature to a warped piece of wood. To rectify this warp, a skilled ...
Looking through the lens of Holy Scripture, human work must be seen first and foremost as value contribution, not economic compensation. We can have a flourishing, fruitful life even if we don’t get a...
Hebrews 12:5-11, Proverbs 3:11-12, Psalm 94:12, 1 Timothy 4:7-8, Philippians 3:12-14, Matthew 23:23-24, James 1:22-25, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...
The noted English architect Sir Christopher Wren was supervising the construction of a magnificent cathedral in London. A journalist thought it would be interesting to interview some of the workers, s...
In his book Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth , Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo. While watching his daughter get “inked...
While brokenness is difficult, it’s beautiful because it makes God look good. Your natural gifts draw attention to yourself while brokenness draws attention to your Lord. With this in mind, power is d...
The very nature of light provides contrast. In juxtaposition, differing levels of light illuminate in extraordinary ways, helping us to see what we’ve been missing. In the late 1400s, the art world ma...
Jeremiah 17:9-10, 2 Samuel 12:1-7, Proverbs 16:2, Matthew 7:3-5 , Hebrews 4:12-13 , Psalm 139:23-24
He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of sel...
To make suggests making something out of something else the way a carpenter makes wooden boxes out of wood. To create suggests making something out of nothing the way an artist makes paintings or poem...
G. K. Chesterton was well-known (and iconoclastic) in his defense of tradition in a time when progress was all the rage in Western Europe- in technology, in the sciences, in philosophy. Chesterton, on...
Poet Donald Hall told the story of a hermit in New Hampshire, a man who passed away leaving behind sheds full of hoarded stuff. In one of the sheds was a box labeled, “string too short to be saved.” ...
Toes curled at the edge before jumping from the plane Bodies crouched in position before bursting from the gate Ballerinas posed behind the curtain front and center stage A child perched on sh...