discussion on Craftsmanship

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...

How would you define a master? Denise Levertov, the American poet, offers one definition by comparing a master to a Mountain: Not one who one imitates, emulates even, but rather, a powerful presen...

Jesus also spent time—decades even—building stuff. Jesus was a tradesman. He is called a tekton (Mark 6:3), a builder who used his hands. God came to earth and apparently thought it worth his while to...

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...

In 1463, members of the City Council of Firenze (Florence) Italy decided they needed a monument to enhance their city. They commissioned a sculptor to carve a giant statue to stand in front of city ha...

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 ...

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...

In 1992, my wife and I traveled to Prague, Czech Republic. One day, near the end of our trip, Beth and I walked through Staroměstské náměstí, a large central square. There in the middle of the square ...

When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. But what is art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, put it: “Art happens when anyon...

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...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with su...

When a leader raises awareness of the need for change, the natural result is for stakeholders to resist that change and the loss that comes with it. When weeks go by and the secret hopes that our live...

When we speak of Christian living as a learned craft, we have a particular image in mind, that of an apprentice serving for years under the tutelage of a master. This is what my (Rich) grandfather did...

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...

In their excellent book, Mending the Divides, Jon Huckins and Jer Swigart describe a Japanese Pottery tradition that articulates the power of peace and reconciliation: When we speak of peace, we can ...

There are going to be broken times when you feel as if everything is under demolition. When things feel unresolved or ruined inside of you. When the only thing you might have the strength to do is thr...

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...

Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you. He custom designed you for a one-of-a-kind assignment. Mine like a gold digger the unique-to-you...

There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...

It isn’t easy to wait. It demands persistence when common sense says “give up.” It says “believe” when there is no present evidence to back it up. Faith is forged in delay. Character is forged in dela...

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...

How much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the insides of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses, and the juice of pine trees to realiz...

At least as important as the things we wait for is the work God wants to do in us as we wait… Picture a blazing hot forge and a piece of gold thrust into it to be heated until all that is impure and ...

G. K. Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Chesterton wasn’t encouraging mediocrity; he was alerting his audience to an important truth: if you wait to do something until you ...

In his post-apocalyptic novel The Road, McCarthy tells a story about a father and son traveling in search of civilization,. In a bleak, desolate world devoid of any human civilization, McCarthy descri...

Resilience is not about becoming smarter or tougher; it’s about becoming stronger and more flexible. It’s about becoming tempered. Which takes us back to the blacksmith’s shop. Tempered. Let the word ...

Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character , notes that the Greek word “charaktér" was “used in connection with tools designed for engraving.” Greek philosophers noted that our past actions ...