Jeremy L. Berg

Nothing to Write Home About

I have always imagined the apostle Paul spending every waking hour of his life teaching in a synagogue or preaching on a street corner somewhere.  I doubt I’m the only one who has drawn this inaccurate assumption.

I mean, this is the impression the writings give us — especially the adventure-filled pages of Acts.  Neither Luke nor Paul himself say more than few words about Paul’s day job as a tentmaker. And can you really blame them?  This was hardly glamorous work worth wasting precious ink and papyrus to write home about!  Yet, R.F. Hock has shown that, far from being peripheral to Paul’s life, tentmaking was central to it:

“More than any of us has supposed, Paul was Paul the Tentmaker. His trade occupied much of his time. . . . His life was very much that of the workshop . . . of being bent over a workbench like a slave and of working side by side with slaves” (Hock, The Social Context of Paul’s Mission, 1980, p. 66).

This fact is worth pondering a bit further.  Think of how many waking hours Paul spent in the dirty, grimy, hum-drum work of leatherwork when he wished he were out sharing the gospel.  Acts 18 seems to suggest he worked with his hands all week and only preached in the synagogue on the sabbath.

I have a hunch Paul frequented the ancient equivalent of Starbuck’s often and shared the gospel with many of the folks he encountered day to day.  But I wonder how he could contain himself, keep himself sane in a hot, sweaty workshop surrounded by dead animal skins when he knew living souls out in the streets still needed to hear the life-giving message of the gospel.

Back in the classroom in now my third year of substitute teaching I began to draw comfort from this realization.  My life was very much the same as Paul’s in this respect.  He spent his days with leather in a workshop while I spent mine with students in a classroom.  We were both tentmaking and wishing we were elsewhere.  The ancient story of Acts that I so longed to experience for myself was beginning to intersect with my own story in profound ways.

I began to make peace with my season of tentmaking.  I could justify doing just about anything during the day if it was allowing me to pursue God’s work by night.  At this time, God’s work still consisted solely of finishing my seminary degree and “growing in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).  When I began to grow frustrated I just told myself that “If Paul had a day job, then I could too.”

By the third year, I had become a ’regular’ sub teacher in my hometown high school and began to sink down roots and establish an identity closer to that of a full time teacher.  I knew the students and they knew me. This made the job much more rewarding and enjoyable. Plus, I no longer needed to drive all over the Twin Cities metro area in order to have work each day.

In fact, at this time I tried to one up my spiritual hero by adding a couple more “tentmaking” gigs to earn some extra cash. (These were not high-paying gigs!) I began coaching high school basketball at this time all winter and teaching Driver Education on weekends and during the summer months.  And this is where my story begins to get more interesting.