Life Aboard the Axiom

Excerpt from "The Quiet Ambition"

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have whatever you want, whenever you want it, without needing to gain it or make it by the work of your own hands? Pixar’s prescient 2008 film WALL-E raises this question and responds in compelling fashion (WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton [Emeryville, CA: Disney Pixar, 2008]).

The movie portrays a world in the not-too-distant future that is supposed to be utopia. Humans have taken up residence aboard the outer-space cruise ship the Axiom (funded by retail mega-giant “Buy-n-Large”), in which your every wish is granted at the touch of a button—while you continue to recline atop your hovering armchair. A pleasant voice intones over the PA, “Buy-n-Large: everything you need to be happy!” Lunch-in-a-cup is delivered directly to your hover-chair. Screens projected inches in front of the passive viewers constantly pipe in prepackaged entertainment (alongside a steady stream of ads, of course). Liberated from labor, people swell up to comic proportions; the population looks like a band of oversized babies. Consumption has wholly supplanted creation.

Would it be great to live in a world where you are freed from the need to work with your hands? The movie answers with a resounding no: life aboard the Axiom looks a lot more like a dystopia. It takes a spunky little garbage-collecting robot called WALL-E to help recover a more human future for the erstwhile occupants of earth. And tellingly, essential to the rescue strategy is reconnecting with creation: WALL-E has to deliver a fragile seedling, a sign of life from a forgotten planet, into the heart of the Axiom in order to initiate the return voyage home. The movie concludes with the bewildered humans putting the precious young plant into the ground as the captain of the ship explains, “This is called farming!” The epilogue during the end credits shows people creating anew: gardening and building and painting and more. It’s a beautiful coda to a moving film—one that helps us understand just what is at issue in our adoption (or lack thereof) of the quiet ambition’s calling to work with our hands.

The problem is not that some of us are creative and that some of us are not. The problem, as WALL-E so powerfully portrays, is that our consumerist digital age seduces us to surrender our creative nature for a life of passive consumption.

Master craftsman Doug Stowe agrees. In his book The Wisdom of Our Hands, Stowe marvels at the diverse expressions and benefits of creative handiwork. “The hands have been the fundamental means through which the world has been shaped, measured, studied, and understood,” he writes. He observes how the hand itself is a tool—used for kneading, grasping, cutting, striking, and so on—and how all the actions of tools come from the motions of human hands.

“Our hands are the means by which we test the substance of the physical world and come to an understanding of our place within it,” Stowe writes. “With our hands, we measure the temperature, the weight, and the shape of things and whether they are coarse or smooth. So, the hands are not only instruments of creativity; they are also sensing devices without which our understanding of our world would be incomplete” (24). Coining a delightful phrase, Stowe praises the blessings of “sawdust therapy.”

For this reason, Stowe laments the state of our present world, in which we are increasingly disconnected from the work of our hands. “Either we are active participants in the creation of human culture, or we are passive consumers of it,” he writes. “Those who make things—whether lovely, handcrafted things from wood, or music, or spaghetti—have a leg up on, or should I say a stronger grasp than, those who allow themselves to become idle consumers of a culture produced by others” (125).

Wendell Berry trenchantly underscores this point in his classic essay “The Pleasures of Eating.” He observes how specialization of production has led to specialization of consumption, so that now “patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers.” True to his core concerns, Berry then turns to the food industry, whose patrons have “tended more and more to be mere consumers.” With wry fatalism, Berry concludes: “The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach” (Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in What Are People For? [New York: North Point Press, 1990], 146). He might as well be describing the passengers aboard the Axiom. We’re all tempted to live on it now: a hurtling spaceship of hopelessness.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Consumption has its place, and there is no sin in enjoying the works of others’ creativity (such as WALL-E!). We are, however, created to be creative; to work with our hands as an expression of God’s image within us and for the benefit of our neighbors. This aspect of quiet ambition is available to us all. So what’s an easy entry point for being more creative? And moreover, what is it about creativity that pushes back on the dread effects of quiet desperation?

Soli Deo Gloria

When I first met Lance, I wouldn’t have taken him for the creative type. I don’t think he would have taken himself for that. He has more the persona of a dude rancher. He stands 6’3” with a handlebar mustache and a laugh that can be heard two states away. He wears cross-shaped pins that are draped in the flag, often sports a black ball cap that has on it a rifle and 2A, and whenever his phone rings he gets a greeting from (as he refers to him) “45.” He also has the kindest heart you can imagine.

Once upon a time, Lance had designs on ministry. Sure of his path, he and his wife, Caroline, pulled up stakes and moved across the country to attend seminary. But he’s a right-brain thinker, and the left-brain exactitude needed to learn Greek, the language of the New Testament, quickly did him in. After only a few months, Lance dropped out.

Head hung low, he and Caroline retreated to their hometown to pick up the pieces. Hadn’t God called him? Didn’t he have good works prepared for him? It was a real moment of vocational and even existential crisis. But existential crises have to wait when you’ve just got to find a way to put food on the table, and after spending their savings to make the move to seminary, Lance had to find work fast. One thing he knew he could do was work with his hands. He couldn’t be a pastor, but at least he could be a painter.

Lance threw himself into the work and established a reputation in the community as not merely some utilitarian house painter but a real artist. He took pride in his work, doing it “as for the Lord and not for men.” Still, he would speak wistfully of his missed opportunity for ministry, like a broken-hearted lover lamenting the one that got away. When a friend and fellow church member started seminary, you could hear the pious envy in Lance’s voice when he asked about it. He relished in and excelled in his vocation as a painter, but it was nevertheless undeniable that he felt something was still missing.

And then one day Lance came to me with an idea. It had been excruciating for him, he said, to sit in our pews at church Sunday after Sunday. “Are my sermons really that bad?” I asked. He laughed. “No, it’s not that,” he said. “It’s these walls. They’re bare white and they have more cracks than Humpty Dumpty. Let me paint them.” Then he laid out his vision for restoring the grandeur of our 140-year-old sanctuary. Frankly, I was a little skeptical, but I brought the plan to our church council, and a few months later Lance and his team began their work.

I could hardly believe the creative artistry. Not only was he able to restore nearly a half-mile of lineal feet of cracks in the aged plaster—no mean feat—but he brought back the historic stenciling, brought out the latent beauty of original architectural details, and all told made our house of God to look as good or better than when it was first built by German immigrants in the 1800s.

“Lance,” I said, marveling, “you’re a true artist.” I wondered not only at the work done, but how God had worked in Lance’s life. It hadn’t gone how he had planned, but the Lord was undeniably using his creative gifts of “working with his hands” to bless many lives.

Lance tugged my sleeve. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to show you,” he said. He led me around to the entrance to the sanctuary. There, in dazzling gold letters over the doorway, were three words: Soli Deo Gloria.

When we work with our hands in a spirit of faith, we’re not just making stuff. We’re fashioning hope. We’re leaning into the prayer of Moses in Psalm 90:17: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!”

Adapted from The Quiet Ambition by Ryan Tinetti. ©2025 by Ryan Tinetti. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

Ryan P. Tinetti is a pastor who now serves as a professor of practical theology at Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis). He is the author of Preaching by Heart and The Quiet Ambition. Ryan served for fourteen years in parish ministry.

Link to The Quiet Ambition: https://www.ivpress.com/the-quiet-ambition

Art by Lacee Black (@sakurasenshi).