No-Sweat Holiday

I spent my 16th summer building trails in a national park, decided I didn’t like manual labor, and so have spent the rest of my life avoiding jobs that caused me to sweat. When I’m around ­people who sweat on a regular basis, I feel inferior. I avoid the Amish like the plague. An Amish family down the road from us planted a garden which the children tend. I drive the long way around so I don’t have to see the children and feel ashamed.

So when I say Labor Day is the holiday I hate the most, you shouldn’t be surprised. All the rest of the country is taking a well-deserved rest from their toils, while I’ve been doing all I can to avoid manual labor and, I might add, doing it quite masterfully. No one spends more time avoiding grunt work than me.

This isn’t to say I’m lazy. I’ve written 22 books, plus thousands of sermons, essays, and speeches, but didn’t perspire doing it, causing sweaty people to say things like, “If you had to do a real job, it would kill you.” There’s nothing worse than a sweaty person who thinks everyone who doesn’t do what they do must be lazy. Labor Day doesn’t help. We extol people who built America by the sweat of their brows, who tilled the soil, built the roads, forged the iron, and conquered the wilderness, which leaves me out. Just once, I’d like a Labor Day that celebrated people like me, writers who battled sentence fragments, essayists who met impossible deadlines, pastors who woke up with a cold but preached anyway. Where’s our Labor Day? Where are our parades, our soaring speeches, our day off with pay?

I have a bad back from sitting too much and carpal tunnel syndrome from typing, but I don’t dare complain about it. My neighbor Bill is a plumber. Twenty years ago he fell in a ditch and mentions it at least once a day. People say, “That must have hurt. I bet it’s tough to be a plumber. Let me buy you lunch.” Once a year, I might mention my bad back to Bill and he’ll say, “Yeah, that’s what happens when you sit around doing nothing. If you had to do a real job, it would kill you.” I probably don’t have to tell you that Bill sweats more than anyone I know. I’ve known him since first grade in Mrs. Mann’s class, and he was moist even then.

I’m not sure what you would call a Labor Day for people who don’t labor, but we need such a day since more and more of us aren’t breaking a sweat. My parents have 27 descendants, only two of whom sweat on a regular basis, my farmer son and my construction supervisor nephew. Whenever I tell them I’ve been working hard, they roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, right.” When I told them I was retiring at the end of this year, they asked, “From what?” And not just them, but others. In fact, most everyone I know. Then they say, “If you had to do a real job, it would kill you.” It would serve them right if I dropped dead during my last sermon. I hope it’s a hot day and the air conditioning is broken. My flock will gather around my still form, notice the rare beads of sweat on my forehead, and write a song memorializing my death, just like they did for John Henry, the steel-driving man.

He preached so hard he broke
his heart,

He laid down his Bible and
he died.

They can leave out the part about my bad back and carpal tunnel syndrome. No one wants to hear it.

Philip Gulley is a Quaker pastor and author of 22 books, including the Harmony and Hope series, featuring Sam Gardner.

This article is featured in the September/October 2026 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.