Six in the Morning

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest.” — Ecclesiastes 9:10 (ASV)

David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 at Blantyre Works, a cotton-mill village on the River Clyde, about eight miles from Glasgow in Scotland. The Livingstones lived in Shuttle Row, a tenement built for the workers, and they had one room. In it the parents cooked, ate, slept, read and prayed, and raised their children. David was the second of seven. Two of them died young.

His father, Neil, sold tea from door to door. He was devout, stern and strict about books: novels wasted time, he thought, and science books were suspect. David loved books about travel and science, and father and son fought a long, quiet battle over it. The last time his father beat him, David remembered, was for refusing to read a dull religious book that seemed to set faith against the study of nature. His mother, Agnes, was small, neat and cheerful, and made a tea-seller’s income stretch. Sometimes, at midnight, she came and took the book out of his hands so that he would go to bed.

The family treasured one story. An ancestor on the Hebridean island of Ulva, dying, told his children he had searched the family’s whole history and never found a dishonest man in it. He left them one rule: “Be honest.” Of all his family’s traditions, David said, that was the only one he felt proud of. Later in life people accused him of being stubborn and hard. Almost nobody accused him of being dishonest about money.

In 1823, at ten, David went into the mill as a piecer. His job was to walk up and down beside the spinning machines and join the threads when they broke, reaching in among the moving parts without stopping them. The day ran from six in the morning to eight at night, with short breaks for meals, in heat and noise and air thick with cotton dust. He did it for ten years. Say it plainly: that system used up children for profit. Livingstone never complained about it, and later called it a school. Both things are true.

With part of his first week’s wages he bought a Latin grammar. After work he went to the mill’s night school from eight until ten, then studied at home until midnight or later. At the mill he propped a book on the machine and caught a sentence at a time as he passed. It taught him to concentrate anywhere; years later he could read and write in the middle of a shouting crowd. On free days he went collecting plants, rocks and fossil shells.

The mill gave him two things he would need in Africa: endurance, and respect for working people. He was often more at ease with porters than with officials. It also gave him something less helpful. In a mill, you are what you produce. Livingstone came to judge everyone by how hard they worked, and he despised people who couldn’t keep up. Endurance is a gift. Patience with weaker people is a gift too, and it is much harder to learn at a spinning machine.

One more detail. Much of the cotton spun at Blantyre had been grown by enslaved people in the American South. Young David didn’t think about that. But the idea that Africans might grow cotton to sell, instead of being sold themselves, would one day shape his whole life.

Ecclesiastes says to work with all your might, not because work always succeeds, but because life is short. Livingstone lived that verse. Paul adds: work “as unto the Lord, and not unto men.” Working hard isn’t the same as working for God, and it took Livingstone a lifetime to learn the difference.

Maybe you are the one who always works hardest, and you quietly look down on people who don’t. Or maybe you are carrying a load nobody your age should have to carry. Either way, God sees the work, and the worker.

One thing to do this week: notice one person this week who can’t keep up with you, in a class, a team or at home. Instead of getting impatient, help them once, without making a point of it.