When you get up during the work week is your job a load that you endure or do you get up looking forward to the projects for the day? Maybe you are retired. What are your thoughts looking back?
We celebrate Labor Day this weekend. Labor Day serves two purposes. First it marks the end of summer. Many folks take the opportunity to relax and spend time with friends and family.
Secondly it recognizes and honors the working folks. Labor Day looks back and acknowledges our countries accomplishments.
Think back just a generation or two. Can you imagine no electricity, no running water, very little communication, and just about everything done by hand?
My father-in-law has fond memories of the past and talks about pulling into 80 acres with his John Deere A and 2-14s plow. I can't imagine how long that would take driving 3 mph and covering a 28 inch swath. When I ask him he says it was way faster than horses.
Construction must have been very labor intensive back then. We have this old bridge foundation in our field south of Givin next to the Muchikanick Creek. It was built with hewn out limestone blocks about 3 foot by 3 foot by 4 foot. This bridge served a railroad which is on old 1875 county maps.
This is that same railroad right-of-way running through another farm on the Eddyville flats. How in the world did they dig a ditch 30 foot deep, 90 foot wide, and a half mile long before 1875 and where did all that dirt go?
This bridge is still in use on a different set of tracks and sits on the bottom where Jan and I live. Back in 1875 both railroads were in use, going the same place, and in some places were less than 100 feet apart. They were each owned by different railroad companies that each had their own set of tracks. Talk about inefficient and think of all the work it took to build two tracks.
I have a couple of stories for you where people worked hard and pursued the American dream. We have a landlord whose father started making and selling catfish bait in the 1930s. Buddy took over the family business in 1965 and today is manufacturing and selling bait to every major chain store in the United States.
Kaye and Bob are moving to Minnesota. They were given a little good-bye event at our cabin this past week by their fellow employees. Kaye is a local farm girl and started working at Cargill as an intern during summer college breaks in the 1980s doing sanitary clean up as she calls it. She was hired fulltime out of college. In 2008 she became the Facility Manager at Eddyville running the second largest Cargill facility in the world. Currently her new job in Minnesota will have her overseeing 23 facilities.
Our country supposedly has a lot of people out of work yet I see businesses everywhere advertising for help. Business owners like the one below are hiring immigrants because many young folks today are either too busy socially or won't do manual labor. A job is so much more than just getting a paycheck.
I bet you remember your first job for someone other than your parents. I started helping neighbors for 1.75/hr. as an 8th grader. My job as a hired man during my first three years of high school gave me the opportunity to start farming my senior year. Our kids were all required to get a job somewhere other than home for a while. I hope they give their kids that experience. It teaches work ethic, responsibility, and character.
I don't imagine many of you had a comprehensive plan for your life when you started working. I didn't. But if we were willing to use our abilities and talents on even menial jobs God was faithful and blessed that effort. He still does that today by the way. Work isn't always simple or easy, and doesn't always go as planned. It hasn't rained much in the last three months and as you can see in the photo below the crops have died on the weaker soils. In spite of struggles we live in a country where we still have the freedom to pursue our goals and the privilege to chose the work we enjoy.
I've shared this with you before. It's one of my favorites. In Ecclesiastes 5 Solomon says that it is good for a man to find satisfaction in his work. He also says when God gives man possessions and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his destiny, and be happy in his work, this is a gift from God. He concludes that man seldom looks back on the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with the goodness of his heart.
No comments:
Post a Comment