Hard Work

It's already 80 degrees and not even 8:00 yet. Holy moly! The construction crew that's redoing 40th street, right across the street, was at it early this morning to beat the heat. I can remember when I worked for the extension service, scouting cotton in the summers. We would get out there while the dew was still thick and the air had a sweet earthy smell to it. There doesn't seem to be much in the air that's sweet here in the city like there was in the cotton fields of Mississippi County. Man, that was hard work! It was physically demanding to walk the fields in the heat of the day looking for bugs. To bend over into the canopy of the cotton rows and shake the plants to see what kind of bugs fell onto your clothes. Then to count the good bugs compared to the bad ones and see if it was time to tell the farmer to spray. But let me tell you, I had a tan to die for, which is where some of my skin issues come from, I bet. Every morning as the alarm went off before the sun was even thinking about coming up, I would lie there and think about how easy it would be to just quit and go out to the club pool and lie around all day. I was probably praying that the work would get easier, when I should have been praying that I would become stronger.

The great things that we do in life are great because they pull us out of our easy, self-indulgent lives, and we have to work hard and become more than we are. I mean, Paul tells us to "be courageous, be strong." (1 Corinthians 16:13) Do you really think this happens when you’re sitting on that lovely couch of yours with your feet kicked up? There is a time and a place for resting; don't get me wrong. But most of us think that there are enough people doing the work and that we’re not needed. This always fires me up, because I remember how hard it was to get volunteers. "You don't need me. I don't know how to do that. Someone else would be better at it." To me, these are excuses. It's lazy, and it's not being willing to do the hard work. I believe as Christians, we all have a calling in our lives. Our job is to figure out what we're supposed to do, and you don't figure it out by sitting around waiting for it to fall into your lap.

Some people, like my husband, know what their calling is. Me? Not so much. But am I going to wait to be asked to do something that God has put on my heart? No. I'm going to start taking the hard first steps toward the call that I hear coming for me. Will it be hard? Yes. Will I want to pass it off to someone else "more qualified" than I? Yes. But God is the visionary here, and I am the worker.  

Be strong!

We are not here to play, to dream, to drift;

We have hard work to do, and loads to lift.

Shun not the struggle: face it.

It's God's gift         

 

Maltie D. Badcock