Day 43 – The importance of your life…
Each and every life is important, but how many individuals go through life thinking that what they do doesn’t count and they are not as good as someone else? This is usually due to comparisons or some idea of misplaced values.
After college I was in Ohio for a one-year training program with the Christian ministry I was a part of. We have a 4-hour job commitment in the morning and a 4-hour study commitment in the afternoon.
My assignment was the glorious duty of “Trash Collection”. This meant from 8 AM until Noon, me and my partner Doug (Ian) Murphy collected trash and disposed of it. We also had the responsibility of bringing canned food that was stored in a barn to the kitchen when the cooks needed it for the three meals a day they cooked AND the all-important job of mopping the kitchen floor each night after those 3 meals had been prepared in the kitchen area.
Perhaps in the eyes of everyone else on the planet, that would have been the lowest set of job skills anyone could imagine, but for me and Doug, it was glorious because we redefined our view of what we were doing.
First, we were able to be outside every morning and not stuck in an office. We did physical work which we both loved…Doug was on the swim team at ECU and I, of course, as I have shared, was on the football team at ECU, so this physical work was perfect. We also were able to drive an old tractor pulling a trash trailer, which was fun. And we took it upon ourselves to memorize all the supplies we had in the barn, so if the cooks asked us if we had any corn or peas in the barn, we could tell them exactly how many cans of each were left so they could plan.
The best part was mopping the floor at 11 PM at night as everyone else had gone to bed. Doug and I determined that if we didn’t do a good job taking care of that floor, the health department could come in a shut down the kitchen, which would mean that all of us in the training program and every employee on the grounds would miss the three meals a day that was provided. And since we were in the country in the middle of Ohio, it wasn’t like you could go out to McDonald’s and grab something. So, potentially the entire organization would have to shut down if we didn’t do our job. Doug and I were totally responsible for keeping the place open and functioning…or at least that’s the way we saw it. Talk about a big responsibility…so we took it very seriously.
Now, that may sound silly, but consider something else. Some people who make $40 or $50 thousand a year may consider themselves middle class or even insignificant compared to the $100K+ people. But do you realize that every head of a family is the CEO of that family enterprise and if you make $50K a year as an individual or even $50K a year with both parents working, over a 40-year period you are CEO of a $2,000,000 (that’s 2 million dollars) enterprise…do the math, that’s no light responsibility. So, yes, it is how you define it, so make it a big deal.
After mopping at night, the one thing I had committed myself to was not going to bed until I had sorted out the day. What did that mean?
There was a tiny room at the top of the stairs above the kitchen that Doug and I cleaned that had just enough room for a washer and dryer to do “kitchen stuff”, towels, rags, etc. When I say “tiny” I mean it. With the washer and dryer in there, you only had room to stand and maybe open the door of the machines to load them up. Anyway my point is, it was secluded and private, so I would go in there, sit on TOP of the washer and dryer and talk to God about the day. I made it a habit when things came up during the day, whether conflicts or things I didn’t understand, to put it on a shelf in my mind and then at night, I would go back to that shelf and one by one take them down and talk to God about them. This was a very helpful process for me as I was learning so much and needed to figure out life and it became a habit for me to involve God in ALL issues of my life.
I no longer sit on a washer and dryer at night, but I still involve God in every decision I make and talk to Him about every aspect of my life, the good, the bad and anything I don’t quite understand and that has made a world of difference.
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