Stuff on Hard Work

Introductions are hard.

And speaking of hard things, let's talk about hard work.

/I hope you see what I did there/

I was thinking about this today after being asked to do some hard work of my own. Having a job as a farm hard, hard work is something I'm pretty used to, but today was different.

Today was the always coveted, "Day off." Days off are a bright light in the midst of the dark and dreary routine of the normal work week.

So on this coveted day off, i was asked to do some hard work. While I do hard work on the farm, there is still work to do at the house. Now this work that I was asked to do, i just simply didn't want to do. At. All.

So what's the problem here?

I like the way Mike Rowe puts it, "We've declared war on hard work, as a society. All of us. It's a civil war, a cold war really. We didn't set out to do it, and we didn't twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way, but we've done it. We've waged this war on a couple fronts. Certainly in Hollywood, the way we portray working people on TV is laughable. We turn them into hero's or we turn them into punchlines. We've waged this war on Madison Avenue. I mean so many of the commercials that come out there in the way of a message. What's really being said? 'Your life would be better if you could work a little less.' 'If you didn't have to work so hard.' 'If you got home a little earlier.' It's all in there, over and over again and again."

I think we as a society, myself included, have forgotten that we were put on this earth to work. Genesis 1:28, "And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'”

Not just work, but hard work. Having dominion over every living thing that moves on the earth, is a pretty tough job to handle.

But back to the question, what's the problem here? The problem is motivation.

To be completely honest, I wouldn't be out there if it wasn't the other bright light of the week, my paycheck. Most of my job is incredibly boring stuff. I hope and pray that I never have to hold another paint roller in my life. But with the incredibly boring stuff, there is also that ten percent of fun.

Adam Savage, one of the hosts of the popular TV show Mythbusters, puts it like this, "When you're doing this job and ninety percent of it is this crushingly boring stuff, how do you get to that ten percent that's really fun? You get to do it by earning the right to do it, by doing the crushingly boring stuff well."

How do you do the crushingly boring stuff well? Good motivation. The motivation driving you do to the crushingly boring stuff, shouldn't be for the money, it should be doing it for God's glory. Colossians 3:23, "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men."

So I'll end my stuff on hard work with a challenge.

How about we get back to work, for the right reasons?