In these modern times we tend to view the fruit of our labor as totally fungible, or economically interchangeable. We think that there is no significant difference between, say, mowing our lawn and earning the money necessary to have someone else mow our lawn—what is important is that the lawn ends up mowed, not who did the mowing.
It isn’t hard to find cases where a listener will agree that, no, I certainly wouldn’t pay someone to do that. But it is surprising to think back and realize how many tasks that would have given rise to such a reaction in times past are hired out without a second thought today. Five years ago a missionary friend of mine told me that he had been surprised to learn that you could buy a bag of salad greens—that people were now paying other people to chop their lettuce. I chuckled—nervously, because I had seen such bags and thought they might not be a bad idea; and since then we’ve ended up buying them regularly. These days I waffle on the matter of pre-cooked bacon.
Some tasks are God-given, and I’ve written at length about the reasons that we are not to turn them over to someone else to do for us. In other cases it is lawful to delegate them, but we must still decide if it is wise to do so. Not too long ago I wrote a post that listed a number of practical reasons for doing something yourself.
But the most important reason to consider doing a job yourself is that it might very well do a good work in you and others. There are real differences between handing your child a Happy Meal and cooking him a dinner, between handing him a book on tape and reading it aloud to him, between sending him off to music lessons from an expert and making your own halting efforts to teach him yourself, between handing him someone else’s booklist and making one of your own for him, between sending him off with on a hike with the scouts and going for a walk with him yourself. Those differences are to be treasured, and we should think carefully before depriving ourselves and others of them.
