Bless the Work of Our Hands: Prayers and reflections for creatives

Pausing to think, pray and yield to God at every stage is a natural, vital element of the creative process.

Bless the Work of Our Hands offers prayers, reflections and biblical character studies to encourage Christian creatives to commit themselves and their projects to God. Written for hobbyists and paid professionals alike, playing and working in every genre, it encourages an honest, open-handed and open-hearted approach, in order that all we produce and all we become from our creative toil may bring glory to God.

Church Times 28 August 2026. Reviewed by Catherine Lomas

FOR a book aimed at creatives, there is something rather pleasing about the look and feel of Jane Walters’s Bless the Work of Our Hands. Its gold-embossed cover reveals prayers and reflections with a single focus: to encourage artists and makers of all disciplines in their creative work to the glory of God.

The book is divided thematically: sections 1-13 address what might be termed “stages in the creative process”, including inspiration, encouragement, failure, and rest. Section 14 is tailored to specific creative activities; prayers for painters, sculptors and musicians sit alongside more niche fields, such as paper-crafters and perfumers. Published by BRF, the book is interspersed with scriptural quotations, with added “character focus” sections exploring the experiences of biblical creatives, including Demetrius (the “silver-idol maker”) and Joseph (the “unseen carpenter”).

Overall, this is a book written in the first person, with soul-searching honesty. It might enable creatives to voice their own struggles and joys and addresses the loneliness that often comes with solitary art practice through its pervasive reassurance that you are not the only one to feel this way.

The conversational prayer style is clearly intended for personal devotion more than for public worship; these are not prayers that reveal their depths as soon as they are lifted from the page. Rather, they require an openness to dwell with them, to pray within them, that they might reveal your heart through them. For those more liturgically minded, the book might serve as inspiration from which to craft something new, a creative act that the author expressly encourages to make the words one’s own.

This is a book, therefore, for creatives to have at hand to “inspire, guide and cheer us on our way” (after Timothy Dudley-Smith), and in which to find solace in times of challenge when inevitably they come.

The Revd Catherine Lomas is a priest-iconographer and theological artist, based in Gloucester diocese. Details of her practice and ministry can be found at: catherinemaryicons.uk.