The Quiet Violence of Being Useful

There’s a message many of us have absorbed without ever being taught it outright: that our value comes from what we can do.

For men, this often takes the form of physicality and provision. Worth is tethered to the ability to lift, build, fix, endure, and protect. A man is encouraged to prove his significance through output.

For women, the expectation takes a different shape. Worth is tethered to the capacity to nurture, care, soothe, carry, and sustain. A woman is encouraged to prove her significance through giving of herself.

The roles are different, but the message is the same:

Your body is here to serve a function.
Your worth depends on how well you fulfill it.

This message is thin and flattening. It asks the human soul to justify its existence by producing, providing, or caring in ways that often leave little room to simply be a person.

And I’ve been noticing the way this same message shows up in certain Christian spaces, especially around the language of “being the hands and feet of Christ.” I’ve heard that phrase my whole life, and only now am I starting to feel its weight. Not the intended meaning, but what can happen when the metaphor becomes primary.

The phrase itself isn’t the problem. In its best and most spacious meaning, it speaks to participating in love — extending compassion into the world. But when the metaphor becomes the center, something shifts. It can begin to blur personhood. It can begin to suggest that we are here first and foremost to do. To act. To serve. To be useful.

When that happens, the body becomes an instrument of ministry before it is a life that is loved.

And for some of us, the metaphor touches something even deeper. There is a history, particularly in communities of color, of bodies being valued for their labor and not their lives. In my cultural memory, the hands and feet are the parts sent into fields. The parts that toil while profit is gathered elsewhere. The parts that are worked, worn, replaced.

Even if I never worked the fields myself, the story is in the air I grew up inside. A story of usefulness being demanded before personhood is recognized.

So when I hear “be the hands and feet of Christ,” something in me sometimes hears:
Be a tool. Be of use. Don’t ask to be seen.

I know that’s not what everyone hears.
But it is what some of us carry.

This doesn’t mean action is unimportant. Service, compassion, and participation in healing are real and necessary. But action that comes without personhood becomes exhaustion. Service that comes without belonging becomes self-erasure. Doing before being sets a pace that becomes what I can only call holy burnout.

There is another way.

Personhood before usefulness.
Presence before action.
Being before doing.

When belonging is the starting place, not the reward, something shifts. Action becomes expression, not proof. Service becomes offering, not obligation. Care becomes spacious, not consuming.

And our bodies — our hands, our feet, our breath, our presence — are no longer instruments of justification. They become ways we participate in love that is already true.

We are not here to be used.
We are here to be known.

And from being known, we act.