Does anybody really work anymore? Here’s why I ask. Last week I drove over to our local Valvoline for the annual inspection on my car. A
bunch of us customers just started casually talking, and suddenly I felt my
heart take a serious look into the way I live. We all sat there for the same reason: Because we preferred to pay Valvoline to do our work. One lady said she also wanted Valvoline to change her oil. Another lady wanted to find a good place to get her car washed. Then came mention of locating a reliable lawn service. Then still, someone was going by the salon to get her fingernails painted. Add to all that, the fact that almost any place on the planet you can hear someone talking about eating out, and finally all this talk of paying other people to cook and clean and work for us became quite noticeable to me. It's like buying
clothes and realizing we're actually hiring someone else to do our sewing.
And the list goes on and on and on to the point of sounding like we
don’t do any work ourselves because we’re always paying someone else. When we buy books, aren’t we really paying
someone else to write? Aren’t we paying
school taxes and tuition for someone else to teach our children? And if we’re paying out all this money for
other people’s work, when is it that we do any work? The physical energy of work can be
cleansing. I remember the words of my
aunt who taught decades of school children.
She told of the difference she saw when kids could no longer safely
walk to school. Students began arriving campus all pent-up because they just hopped
out of the car instead of walking out their energy. And it makes sense. Second Thessalonians 3 tells us: “If a man will not work, he shall not
eat.” So we know work can be a good thing. And as this chapter 3 cautions against idleness and becoming a busybody, which is not a good thing, I've been looking introspectively to examine the types of work I do. Sometimes my
husband and I tackle a new project when we’re stressed. Recently painting
our kitchen cabinets, we knew the physical motion of taking out the paintbrushes and manually
disassembling the doors helped us to unwind. The process of rotating the screwdrivers and removing the hinges ourselves allows the
emotions to release, much like the children whose walking helped them unwind before school. And if we pay someone else to do all our work,
we miss out. In fact, our next home project
is painting the fascia boards outside, and it’ll definitely involve some sweat, but it’ll also have that element of good in its
physicality. And so I wonder, how many
other jobs should I consider doing on my own instead of paying someone else? Could there be a a new task coming your way as well?
