Praying One Shovelful at a Time

Richard J. Foster tells a story about his youth, working among the Inuit people of Kotzebue, Alaska. He found that the Inuit people he was living among “had a deep sense of the wholeness of life” with no distinction between prayer and work.

Only a teenager, he had gone to Alaska to help build “the first high school above the Arctic Circle,” but the work was backbreaking. One day he was digging a trench through the frozen soil. An Inuit man watched him for a while and then said, “You are digging a ditch for the glory of God.” Foster never forgot it. Nobody would remember that he dug…