On the recommendation of a Facebook friend, I recently read the book Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. It was a pretty quick read, but immensely helpful for me. It’s about the author’s switch from the world of living in his mind as Think Tanker with a Ph.D. to the world of tangible things as the owner of a motorcycle repair shop. His point is that those who have careers in what’s termed the “thinking economy” end up missing out on real things. And since they live in their heads, so to speak, they miss what really works in terms of problem-solving because they don’t know how to find what the problem actually is. In other words, they think they know how to fix things in the real world, but they really don’t because they don’t know what’s actually wrong. They know the symptoms of the wrong but not the root of it. And since they live in a world of thought and not actual things, they don’t know whether what they propose will work or not because they have no way of testing it out. Whether you agree with his thesis is not the point of this post. Though I do recommend the book.

As pastors we spend a lot of time in our heads. And this book got me to consider that I need to get our of my head and into real things–things that can be touched and broken and put back together. To use my mind to do something other than think about big ideas and focus on building things and fixing things and finding real solutions to mundane things. (I live in a parsonage so fixing the house isn’t quite one of them.)

So I took up woodworking. I have never felt as calm as I do now that I’ve taken up building things and fixing my mistakes. There’s something about working with your hands with sharp and powerful tools that engages my mind so that I can actually shut off the part of my mind that would keep running even when the workday was over. I do these woodworking projects with my older boys. They’re homeschooled, so it’s their shop class, which is a nice side benefit. I also think that I’m more focused in my church work, more ordered in my workday and more productive. I find that reading is easier. And even sleep comes much quicker. And there is nothing as satisfying as finishing a project to step back and say: “I built that. It’s going to go here.”

So now to my overarching point: It took me thirteen years to figure this out, despite being told that I needed to find a hobby. I used to do a lot of things but nothing that took my mind off of the things of the ministry. This did. So my overarching point is to say to clergy and lay alike: Get out of your head for a while. Pick up something that you can do with your hands, get dirty, make mistakes and find a way to fix them. It will do loads of good for you and for those around you.

What are some of the things that you folks do to get out of your head and into tangible things?