Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs has become a smash hit. While I’ve only seen a couple of episodes, it has given me and ever greater appreciation for the various dirty work people do to make our lives easier and our communities beautiful. 

Besides giving people an “ick” thrill, Rowe is doing us another favor—he’s elevating ‘dirty’ work. Society can’t only run on so called desk jobs because someone has to muck the putrid trash from the city dump.

Rowe isn’t the only person who’s elevating manual labor. A few years ago, designer Debbie Travis started a show called From the Ground Up, where contestants try and win the top spot as the best designer gaining experience and a huge cash prize. Besides achieving her goal of making the house beautiful, Travis’ aim is bigger. Travis maintains that young people don’t have a work ethic, and she wants to help a few of them develop it while also helping them develop a passion for the trades.

She’s right, the series showed the lousy work ethic and dearth of character amongst the contestants, but it also showed something else. Rowe, Travis and others like them, are hoping to spark a revolution amongst the trades by training people to take pride in their work—becoming craftsmen in their own right.

We all pay for shoddy work. A good illustration of this can be seen on Holmes on Homes show staring renovation expert Mike Holmes. Holmes fixes the shambles other “tradesmen” make, maintaining that people should do "it right the first time."

Instead of viewing work as a means to a paycheck, people like Rowe, Travis, and Holmes are elevating work.

Many contemporary writers have addressed the fact that it was the Christians who first elevated work. Until Christians did, people held “work in contempt,” says Rodney Stark. Stark’s goes on to say, “Notions such as the dignity of labor or the idea that work is a virtuous activity were incomprehensible in ancient Rome or in any other pre-capitalist society.” 

Sadly, a lot of Christians seem to have forgotten the significant of work and their own rich heritage of elevating work to its proper place. We should be showing people the significance of work, but instead, like the rest of the culture, many of us work for a paycheck. We ought to be at the forefront of taking those seemingly insignificant tasks and doing them to our utmost for God’s glory?

I’m delighted that some television shows are encouraging high standards of work among the “twentysomethings.” Christians, from the pulpit to the grocery stores, should also be sounding clarion call to people that regardless of whether you get ick under your finger nails from building or sweeping, to teaching or calculating things, all work is God’s work.

Now, for a bit of fun: for some reason, I had a bit of a giggle fit over Rowe’s six “Tenets in Defense of Dirt.” Let me know if you have any new ones to add to his list.