D
RIP . . . DRIP . . . DRIP . . . My Dad life. As he glided down a row of beans And to the man he said, “Because you
was rebuilding the back steps of with a hoe carefully balanced in his have listened to the voice of your wife, and
our house in the heat of the sum- hands, he made the weeding task seem have eaten of the tree about which I com-
mer and I was watching the sweat effortless. The wide, thin blade moving manded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is
drop from his nose. He was leaning over forward and back like a pendulum, the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat
a 2-by-12 board, eyes fixed on the cutting advancing 6 to 8 inches with every cycle, of it all the days of your life; thorns and this-
line, left hand grasping the wood, right steadily reaching forward, grasping a tles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall
hand pushing and pulling a handsaw. fresh swath of weeds: forward, upward eat the plants of the field” (Genesis 3:17-18).
With every downstroke the metal teeth not more than a couple of inches, down, I wanted to be big and strong like my
were chewing through the wood in a and back, over and over and over until dad. I modeled my chopping after his.
steady rhythm. The sweet aroma of fresh we reached the end of the row. He, the With underdeveloped sweat glands, I
sawdust filled the air, and sweat dripped hoe, and the field were one, or so it longed for the day of my manhood. My
from the pores on his face and arms as seemed in my child’s eye. back ached, my arms became lead, but I
his shirt darkened with the moisture.
Hard work—always marked by sweat,
often mixed with blood—helped define
the father of my childhood and youth.
The Glory of God and
“By the sweat of your face you shall eat
bread until you return to the ground, for out
of it you were taken; you are dust, and to
dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19, NRSV).
the Beauty of Work
“Hard work never hurt nobody; that’s
what your Grandpa always says.” Dad
often quoted my mother’s father on that
point. I had plenty of opportunity to
watch and compare them both at work.
by Jackie
For my father, work was an honorable David Johns
challenge, a job worth doing. One might
even say that for him work was the pur-
pose of life. He attacked every task with
focused effort. “A job worth doing is worth
doing right.” “Do it right the first
time and you won’t have to
come back to it so
soon.”
Every
swing of a
hoe was an
assault on weeds
and the construction
of a protective mound
around the cherished
plants requiring three
motions: advancing and rais-
ing the blade 4 to 6 inches
above the ground, chopping
back and down to destroy the
weeds, and jerking upward to redis-
tribute the soil. He never stopped until
the job was done, and he sweated.
Grandpa, always dressed in coveralls
and a cotton long-sleeved shirt, never
sweated, but neither did he often pause
for rest. For him work was the rhythm of
18 EVANGEL • MAR 2009
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