Reclaiming Mundane Tasks

During times when I’m pregnant or nursing, I am always on the look out for Friday penances that don’t include abstaining from meat. Around 6 months ago, I had the idea to give up the dishwasher, a task that I thought would be much more difficult than giving up meat, but I was surprised that this was a wrong assumption. As I washed each dish, I found myself actually enjoying the hands-on work, savoring the mindless task so that my mind could wander freely, and embracing the ability to both appreciate my dishes and quality check the cleanliness of each one. The surprising joy of washing my dishes by hand prompted me to ponder what else I’ve surrendered to a machine in my quest for an easier life.

We have machines that get us from point A to point B, machines that wash our clothes, ones that cut our grass, and most of us waste many of our waking hours staring into a very enticing machine (I understand the irony in the fact that I am using such a device to both publish these thoughts and also to make a living, but alas such are the times we find ourselves). Our modern lives are shaped by the machines we surrender our tasks to.

When Philip and I first started dreaming about our art business, we were hoping to make use of the print-on-demand model. If you’re not familiar with POD, it’s a service that many artists use to be able to bypass printing and shipping themselves by having a third party company pack+ship for them. This means artists don’t have to waste time keeping an inventory or shipping out items themselves. It also allows artists to get started quickly, as you don’t have to pay any upfront costs to keep an inventory (since it ships directly from the printer). Originally our thought was to use POD to focus on creating the actual art instead of wasting time on the more mundane parts of running a business. It sounds like a dream, right?

Yet, as we progressed in laying the foundation for our business, we kept being drawn to the human scale. I fought it hard. I didn’t want to embrace the imperfection of doing it ourselves, but over and over it was calling to me. It felt as though Our Lord wanted to find me in the little moments of packing each box with care ourselves. Of putting some skin in the game by keeping an inventory. Of being able to put in thank you cards and tailor the experience to our customers. Of feeling our humanity.

Lord, help us to do all the small things with great love! Help us to make all the tiny tasks of our days into a prayer to YOU!

DISCLAIMER (because it’s 2025): Machines are useful and important in our modern lives! I think it comes down to a discernment of how we want to spend our time and being intentional about not surrendering everything just because we can. This blog post is meant as an inspiration to find joy again in the mundane things, the human things. Also no shade to anyone who does POD. It truly is amazing that it exists, but just wasn’t what God was calling us to do at this time!

God Bless!
Kat