Guru Gobind Singh Ji was sitting in the hall one day with the sangat all round him, and in the middle of everything he stopped and looked about and said he was thirsty.
A young man got up at once.
Guru Ji made a small sign to him from where he sat. All right. Go on.
The young man went off and came back a few moments later with a glass of cold water, and held it out.
Guru Ji took the glass. Then he looked at the young man properly.
His clothes were spotless. And his hands were the softest, most delicate hands you ever saw, with long clean fingers that had plainly never done anything harder than being washed.
Tell me, said Guru Ji. What work do you do? Your hands are very soft.
And the young man said, with his hands folded: Beloved Guru Ji, these hands are folded for you and they have carried water for you. I keep myself apart from ordinary work. I keep my body reserved.
Is that so, said Guru Ji.
And he moved the glass as though he were about to tip it out on the floor.
The young man got a fright. Guru Ji, he said quickly, my hands have always been pure. I washed my hands first. Then I washed the glass. Then I drew fresh water. There is nothing wrong with it, please drink it.
Guru Ji turned the glass over, and the water ran out onto the ground.
The young man stood there looking at the wet patch, and then at Guru Ji, and then at the wet patch again. He could not think what he had done.
Then Guru Ji said it.
It was carried by a Sikh who does no seva. It was not fit to drink.
The young man went hot with shame. He was thinking about all the people sitting there hearing this, and how he would ever walk into the sangat again.
Guru Ji, he said, when he could speak. My father is a devotee of yours. I have been your Sikh for years. People make mistakes. You forgive sinners. Please forgive mine and put me right.
Listen, son, said Guru Ji, and he was kind about it.
You are the son of a devotee. True. You took the Sikhi and became a Sikh. True.
But a Sikhi you do not practise is like a miser's money. He has it. It does nothing for him. It does nothing for anybody else either.
The first step, said Guru Ji, is seva.
Look around this Gurdwara, he said. Everybody here is doing something for somebody. And what happens when you do that is not only that the work gets done. Your body gets clean. Your mind gets washed. The dirt of thinking yourself important comes off.
And then the Name has somewhere to live, and you start feeling the Lord near you, here, there, everywhere. And after that you would be doing good to people without even deciding to, because it would just be what you are like.
Then he said the sharpest thing, and the truest.
I know you are not a bad person, he said. But keeping your hands idle so that they stay nicely clean is not purity. It is doing nothing.
Keeping hands idle is killing them.
A dead man's hands do no evil either, said Guru Ji. They are simply dead.
The young man put his head down and asked to be forgiven.
And then he went and did something about it, which is the part that matters. He started doing seva in the sangat, with those soft hands. He gave money away. He spent it on making the sangat comfortable, on holy people passing through, on whoever was in need.
He served Guru Ji and the sangat with his own hands from then on.
And I expect his hands were never quite so delicate again.