“Success in life comes from the ability to handle all the things that you don’t want to do.” Tim Brooks
Some days I wake up not sure if I should put both feet on the floor or not? There is an underlying fear that everyone will hear me stirring and the sound of quiet will be whisked away with many needs and wants. Immediately the day will become a race to the finish.
No one begins each morning excited to scrub baseboards and clean out gutters. For me, I cannot remember the last time unloading a car full of groceries thrilled me; even more so when I have a screaming infant in one arm, a torn grocery bag in the other while a bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce goes rolling down the driveway, and a five-year-old telling me story number sixty-seven (something about a unicorn with sparkles). Exhaustion overrides the meaning of the word work. Work being purposeful is the farthest thing from my mind. And yet deep down I know it is in our work that we find fulfillment.
We were at one of Eva Jewel’s little friend’s birthday party this summer and the ice-cream truck pulled up to deliver sweet treats to all the children. When the ice-cream driver had finished serving everyone, he started entertaining us with stories. During one of his stories, he rabbit-trailed and made a statement I will not soon forget. He said, “There ain’t no shortage in jobs; there’s a shortage in desire; ‘the want to’. I ain’t never met hard work that I liked. But I’ll tell you what I do like, that cold air blowin’ in my home. The power company knows where the meter is out behind my house too so I get up and I go work.” We all laughed at his witty explanation.
Despite what the government wants us to believe, money comes from work; it is not handed to us. If I want something out of this life, I am going to have to work for it. The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 5:20 “God keeps him busy with the joy of his heart.” Our work may not look the same, our joy comes in different occupations, but the result is the same; fulfillment is the compensation of working to serve not working to quit.
I remember one day my husband randomly told me that when he retires, he is going to open up his own lawn care business. I asked him why he would do that? He answered with “I can’t sit and do nothing. I need to work. Besides I like money. Lots of it.” Chuck’s favorite pastime is working. He enjoys being productive and solving problems. During his college years, he had a professor that told him he would never make it through his upper-level Engineering courses working three jobs. Chuck met his challenge and when he graduated, he went and personally laid his diploma on the professor’s desk as if to prove “the want to” factor.
So much joy can be found in work; wonderful snippets of daily operations are found inside of life’s daily grind, but most of us just want to get done and get on to the next thing; grab and go as quickly as we can.
There is no such thing as working to quit. Work will never go away. Whatever life you’re living in today is because of what you built yesterday. Don’t work to quit. Work to serve.
Welcome Home
“Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; But much increase comes by the strength of an ox.” Proverbs 14:4
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