Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly

Welcome to ClearCast. ClearCast is a ministry of Clearnoat Church in West Indianapolis. I'm your host, Tim Dukeman. I'm here with our producer, Martin, and of course, Pastor Dave. So today we're going to talk about work ethic, and the theme of the season is things I wish I'd known in my 20s. And so, Pastor Dave, what's something you wish you'd known in your 20s about work ethic and working hard? having a good work ethic is something that you learn in your childhood. And if you don't learn it in your childhood, you're going to have a really hard time learning it later because what you, you didn't just not learn to have a good work ethic. You learned to have a bad one. Yeah. And so, um, I mean, how do you learn work ethic? I mean, you teach your kids to have chores, you teach them to, to, um, to do things. You make them repeat them when they didn't do them well enough. Um, you get, you get bad grades. Like, um, you make people do things that they don't enjoy. You make people do things that they're not good at. Like some of my kids are better at, you know, their chores than the others. And if, you know, if someone in our, in our home is getting lazy, like it's not uncommon for them to just have the work piled on. If someone's struggling with sin.

you're going to get the work piled on. You're going to be relieving other people's chores. And a work ethic is learning to do what's necessary and to be able to delay your own desires. I don't think that we work for a reason. There has to be some reason behind why we work. And if it's simply something, if it's just like why work to pay the bills, that's a pretty... It's true. You have to work to pay the bills. But that's a pretty low bar. It's not a very motivating reason to work. And so then when you have other competing desires, something that's a stronger desire, well, then work is the thing that gets cast aside. And so work ethic in our day and age is hard to talk about because the bar is so low for what being a hard worker or...

is like like nowadays if you'll simply come to work on time or close to on time regularly and already money ahead and you're not and you don't argue like don't outright argue and fight with your boss and make some effort to do what you're told like really just better than the other guy then you're a hard worker. So in one sense, by the world's standards right now, it's really easy to be a hard worker and to have a good work ethic. But that's only because the bar is so low. As long as you're working harder than the guy next to you, as long as you make more money than your friends, as long as you're tired at the end of the day, as long as you put in your 40 hours or whatever, you're presumed to be a good employee.

Or a hard worker. And I don't think that that's where Christians should have the bar set for their work ethic. What I've often said to the men in our church and men's group or what have you is I say a hardworking man is not a man who works hard at the things he's good at. He's a man who works hard at the things he's bad at. Because that's where you show whether you actually have a work ethic. Will you struggle through and learn, cultivate aptitude or whatever? with the things that don't come naturally to you, that you don't enjoy. My wife and I were just talking about the various responsibilities we have. She has responsibilities. I've got my responsibilities. And we were just kind of talking about the fact that there are parts of our life that we just don't enjoy. We don't like doing. And that we still have to do them. That was sort of us just kind of...

shoring each other up and saying, yeah, we still need to, like, we still need to actually work at those things. Like if a guy says, you know, I just don't like to, I just really don't like to get up early in the morning. I just really struggle. I'm like, but you have to put that to death. Yeah. Like you don't have to get up at five o'clock in the morning or four o'clock in the morning every morning, but like you need to get to work or class or wherever you're going every single day on time. Like I can't tell you how many times I've had guys tell me like, oh, my alarm didn't go off. I'm like, It's a machine. Your alarm went off. I guarantee your alarm went off. You might have hit snooze. You might not have woken up. You might have slept through it. You might have slept for 20 minutes while it went off and then it stopped. But your alarm is your cell phone, and I guarantee you don't turn your cell phone off at night. You just didn't set an alarm, which is kind of not preparing to go to work the next day.

Or she just decided not to get out of bed. I was just telling my kids a few days ago we were doing something. One of my kids was supposed to set the table. That was his job for dinner. But his brother was making lunches for the next day, so he had the lunch stuff out on the table. So he couldn't set the table. He said, well, what I was going to do was I was going to go outside for five minutes. I was going to go play for five minutes. And then I was going to come back in because then he'd be done and then I'd make lunch. And he set an alarm on his phone, on his watch. He doesn't have a phone. On his watch. Set a timer for five minutes. It's going to beep. I'm going to go back in. Well, the reason that we were having this discussion at my house was because he didn't get the table set. He got distracted. Something else happened. The alarm went off. His brother wasn't done. He didn't reset it. Whatever. Failure was the destination.

And so I said to him, I said, you know, honey, I have that same thought every morning. I'll just sleep another five minutes. I'll just lay here another 10 minutes. You know what happens every single time? I think, oh, I just need a few more minutes of sleep. Here's the truth. If you're tired, 10 more minutes of sleep isn't going to help you one bit. It's just going to make your day worse because you're going to start your day off behind. Like just get going. Like, oh, I just can't. I don't wake up in the morning. I'm sorry. You're a grownup. You're going to have to learn how to do this adult thing. Get up in the morning. If you're really having trouble getting up in the morning, go to bed at night. Part of the reason you can't get up in the morning is because you didn't go to bed at night. And so I wish someone would have told me when I was 20, if you burn the candle at both ends, eventually there will be no candle left. Like you actually have to prepare for the next day. And part of preparing for it is going to sleep the night before.

it doesn't feel like it's fun. It doesn't feel like it's exciting. Nobody else is doing it, but you know, you have no life if I go to bed, but it's like, I'm not saying you have to go to bed at nine o'clock every night of the week, especially when you're 20 and you've got a lot more energy than you do in your 60. Right. But if you just push until you come until you break something until you get so sick that you, you know, you get, cause you're not sleeping, then you'll. There'll be all these consequences. Like you weren't doing well at work. You weren't doing well at school. You weren't doing well in your relationships. You weren't loving people because you're just a tired grump. Right. Yeah. And the other thing too is that like burning the candle at both ends, there are things you can get away with when you're young. Yeah. You can pull all-nighters. You can do a lot more. Like I'm 41. When I was in my early 20s, I probably – there was a period for about a year, maybe 18 months.

I regularly only slept about three to four hours a night. Wow. And I was out climbing trees, like highly physical work for 55 hours a week, roughly. Then I'd go to the gym for two or three hours and then I'd go play pool. And I would go to bed about between one and two o'clock in the morning and I would get up at 5.30 and go to work and be to work at 6 a.m. And that was my schedule. And I could do it. I slept at stoplights. You know, like it was really stupid, really bad, but you were training the Chicago drivers to honk their horns immediately. But the idea of even staying up till midnight now, like it's going to take two or three nights of, of decent sleep after that to even recover. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, Old as I am, I know that. Yeah, the thing you should hear is that when you get to be Martin's age, you just physically won't be able to do these things anymore. So try to build the good habits now. Martin, I do think he has more gray hair than you, though. It's possible. I also have more hair than him. Also possible. We were talking about pastoral care earlier, and I'm curious if you could even get us some anecdotes or some stories about how did pastoral care

uh play into your learning a different kind of work ethic or um was that just something you picked up by osmosis like just it sounds like to me you're a really hard worker uh you just didn't have any discipline to stop yourself from the other stuff you wanted to do well here's the thing about work ethic it is not a one-size-fits-all we work differently i am to this day a procrastinator And the reason I can be a procrastinator, and I don't mean be like I can be like it's a good thing. The reason I can get away with being a procrastinator is that I'm really quick on my feet and I don't get stressed out easily about not having had ample amount of time to prepare. There are other people that I know, it's like if they don't have time to prepare. I remember saying to a guy one time, we were working together and he tried to teach with the amount of prep time that I had to teach.

And his lessons were awful. Like when he put time into it, his lessons were excellent. But when he tried to get by on a shorter, less time than he needed, you could just, it was just apparent in his teaching. And all I could say to him was, you need more time than I do to make the preparation, which means you need to set aside more time to do it. That's not a fault for you. That doesn't mean I'm better than you. It doesn't mean anything. It just means this is what's necessary for you to do your job. My wife, I'm not a planner. I'm a procrastinator. Drives her nuts. Understandably so. But to everyone who doesn't live in my house, we're like, oh, he gets a lot done and he's so productive and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, I waste a ton of time. I just, I operate with deadlines. Deadlines are helpful to me. And I tend to enjoy working under stress. That is one of the things that makes my wife absolutely crazy.

It's like stress is really hard for her to work when there's this deadline or this looming thing. But to me, I'm like, okay, we're going to get it done. It's fine. And I'm just using my wife and me as a foil for how different people work. And so I would not presume that everyone is the same in the way that they work. Some guys really need to plan out and organize. prioritize what they're going to do and how they're going to do it. And that's, and that's good for them. Um, they can err in doing too much of that. It's like, you don't have enough time to do that. I said to one guy, I'm like, you know, you have the same number of hours in the day that I do and you need to learn because you don't work quickly. Uh, you're not, you're not good, efficient. You're not, what did I, I wouldn't say that. I said, I said to this young, this man, I said, because you need, um,

You're taking too long to do your jobs. You need to ask God to make you more efficient. Yeah. Because you can't be gone from your family all the time because you're such a slow worker. Right. Like hard work for you is going to be learning to be more efficient. Stop being a perfectionist. I'm not a perfectionist. People who are perfectionists who aren't working all the time, they've got to go over it and pour over it again, edit it some more. Just one more edit. We just need to know your family needs to have dinner with you. Like you need to be done. It's just the time's over now. So it's finished.

And so a work ethic is, it's a very thing for people. I heard a quote that in 20 years, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids. Wow. It's true. And something that has been very convicting to me, and I hadn't really heard people talk about it before I came to this church, is that there is a responsibility that a father has. to learn how to work hard, to learn how to work fast, so that he can spend time with his family. That it's your job to figure out how to get done faster and not have to be at work all the time. Yeah, and here's the hard thing, is that if you get men, and this is not only true of men, but it is in my conversations, it's usually with men, is that the more proficient you become at something, the more work you will get.

And he who is faithful with little will be given much. That's what happens is you work hard. You're like, okay, I figured out how to carry this load. And then here's another box for you. Here's another baby. Here's another responsibility. Here's another thing, another complexity, another variable. And so I want to disabuse people of this idea that if you learn to work efficiently, if you learn to work hard, you won't have to work as much. It's just not true. What I say to my wife about my work is, because she's like, you love having stress more. You just love it. You thrive on it. And it's true. She's not lying when she says it. I like having a lot to do. But I tell her, I say, what I'm convinced of is that the callings that I have in my life, husband, father, pastor, those callings are not.

intrinsically in conflict with each other. The problem that we are experiencing is my inability to work faithfully in all those areas to manage them. And so the answer is not get rid of some piece of work. It's dad, husband, pastor needs to learn how to juggle all of those things sufficiently and to make sure that your family is not the one that gets dropped. And that's the easiest one to... to drop because it's the one that, that the consequences of dropping it are not immediately apparent. That's my biggest struggle. If my wife was sitting here, that's what she would say. She'd be like, you get a lot done. You do a lot of stuff. You're home for dinner, but it's throughout our marriage. We've been married 17 years. It has been such a job for me to learn, to be engaged at home. And it's still a struggle to be engaged at home with her, with the kids to talk, to not be doing like, if I'm not doing something that's like super productive, super quantifiable.

I'm just like, okay, it's downtime. But it's not downtime at home. And so I have to, but that's a constant area of weakness, area I need to grow in. You're encouraging me. I'm feeling better over here. Because I struggle with some of the same things. Be honest. Yeah. And so developing a good work ethic is, it's a lifelong pursuit. And your work's going to change. I tell men generally in your 20s, you're going to spend your work. You're going to spend your 20s learning how to work. Like you're going to think at 22 or 24 that you're this great employee who's really good. Like why doesn't my boss realize how good I am at whatever it is you do?

But you're not as good at what you're doing as you think you are. Your boss is not crazy, in other words. You're going to spend your 20s learning how to add value, like real tangible value to the company and being able to be entrusted with some level of responsibility. That's what you're going to spend 10 years doing. If you do that well, and these numbers shift and change, but you're going to spend your 30s trying to figure out what it means to lead people. And I don't mean like senior level, high level. I just mean like can you be responsible for yourself and maybe one or two other people? Like can you run a crew or can you oversee a team or can you take the lead on a project or like small leadership? Can you maintain quality and can you work with other people and lead them? Not as like the one being told what to do, but maybe the one who's responsible. Can you learn to delegate some? Can you deal with conflicts? Can you plan out the...

scope the project that's what you're going to spend your 30s doing is learning can you do these basic things um and if you do then your 40s you're going to get bigger more project and i think um you know if you're working and some guys are going to top out they're not just going to keep climbing up the i'm better and i'm good and i'm getting like they're going to top out at where they're gifting and their abilities a lot they max out that's okay yeah Like not everybody, one of the things, this is not about the manosphere, but one of the things that's most frustrating to me about the manosphere is they tell every man that they're supposed to be an alpha male. But not every man is an alpha male. Some men actually have gifts that are better suited to be supporting, that are not the get out and lead the charge kind of guys. If you put them in that position, they will fail. And the things they pursue will fail. They need to be used in the places where their gifts,

are helpful they shine and most guys leadership and their and their their ability to work hard and successfully when you say husband father their own work a lot of guys are getting near capacity yeah that's okay that's not that's not saying like if you're a faithful husband if you're a faithful father if you're a faithful employee and you and you love the church and you serve the church if that's as much as you can get on your plate You've honored God. You've loved God. You've done well. There's no shame in that. And this idea that you're supposed to become these extraordinary examples you have out in front of you of leadership or capacity or intellect, most guys, it's just not what we are. And so when it comes to work ethic, do the work that's right in front of you. Be sure to do the work that's hard for you.

The things you don't have experience in. You don't know how to talk to your wife. Maybe you go to work and you just kill it at work. Just kill it. But when you come home, you have no idea how to love your wife, how to take care of your kids, how to change the faucet, whatever the thing is. You've got to learn that stuff. You've got to learn to talk to your wife. You've got to learn to love her. You can't say, well, I'm no good at that, so I just don't do it. That's a failure. That's a terrible failure. It's like the old saying that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. It's funny. You know, I heard that. I've heard that saying. G.K. Chesterton quote right there. I've heard that saying, and I've also heard, I heard that, and then like the same week, it was like two weeks ago, I heard someone say, if there's anything, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well or with excellence or something. And they're just completely the opposite ideas. The context of anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

in the context in the book when he says it. What he says is, if you need to do something, then you need to do it even if you feel like you're not doing it well. That's what Tim was responding to when he says as far as learning to do things that you're not good at. He's saying, okay, so for instance, like fathering your family and disciplining your children, you should do it even if you do it very badly. Yeah, I agree with that. Because you're the one that has to do it. That's the boy I agree with. When someone was like, if anything's worth doing, it's worth doing with excellence. I'm like, what?

What kind of material are you cut from? I don't do very many things excellently. Well, I think the point there is... It's an aspirational thing. Exactly. Your aspiration should be... Like, if you're terrible at disciplining your children, you don't go, well, I'm really bad at it, but at least I'm doing it. You're going, I'm doing it so that I will eventually be good at it. Right. Yeah. I got a job trying to finish some drywall and working for a friend of mine. And I come to this house and it was patch... It was like... I was patching some spots that needed some work. And then I was supposed to, so I was supposed to sand these five or six different spots and then paint them. And so I would sand it and then I painted it and it would bubble like all around the patch that I'd made. The paint would just bubble through. So I contact my brother and I'm like, what is going on? My brother works for the same guy.

And eventually he came and helped. And he explained to me like why it does it like this. And I watched him work and I was like, I don't ever want to pick up a drywall finishing knife again, ever. This is not my bag. He does it every single day. He's very fast, very good, super good hand. That's the goal. Like I see other people disciplining their children. I'm like, I wish I could do it like that. Like I see how they handle their kids. I see how they handle family worship. I see how that, and I think that's my goal right there. I'm doing it poorly, but it's worth doing, and therefore I'm going to continue to do it poorly. But it's important enough that I hope someday I'm doing it with excellence. I hope someday I'm doing it well enough that other people look on and say, you did a really good job at that. I may never actually look at my stuff and think that, but at least hopefully. Hopefully you're better than you were yesterday. Yeah, exactly. That's what I see as the goal. Yeah, I think work ethic has a lot to do with delayed gratification and your ability to do what needs to be done.

There are days or seasons at work where you just have to do something that's a slog. It's not what you want to do. I find a high correlation between things you don't like to do and being the things you're not good at. It's like, well, you're going to have to develop that skill. Something I think about a lot with work ethic, there's a scene in The Chronicles of Narnia. It's the horse and his boy. At the end, they're running. to try to warn because there's this army coming to him. And basically, you've got the horse running, and he's running as fast as he can, he thinks. And then a lion shows up. You realize he'd not been running fast, not as fast as he could. Right. And so at the end, he says, like, the thing is, you were running as fast as you thought you could, not as fast as you actually could.

And I think that's the concepts that you have to understand if you want to actually have a good work ethic. It's recognizing that you're not working as hard as you can. You're working as hard as you think you can. And you need to actually work as hard as you can. Yeah. And you have to have a why. Like it took the lion. Right. That was the why. I don't want to be eaten by a lion. So that was the why. Like I can run faster because it requires like. You'll pursue the things you want. And if what you want is comfort, ease, you'll pursue those things. You won't have a steady good job, but you'll pursue those things. We've been talking about work ethic or just work in general. We've been talking about my house lately because I've got three teenage boys. They're in the workforce. Well, the oldest one, he's got to get a full-time job this summer. They're doing things.

They're thinking about what they want to do when they get older. And do I want to go to college? Do we not? And so we're just talking about work in general. What do you do? How do you think about it? What should motivate you? A few of them are mowing lawns in our neighborhood. And I said, you guys, you have to have a why. You have to have a specific why I'm doing this. And then let that why motivate you. If all you want to do is ride bikes and play soccer all summer and just goof off, then you're not going to, like if any work you get, you're not going to be real interested in it. But if you're saving up for a car, you're probably going to be willing to do a lot more, give up more in your life and go do those less desirable things because there's a desirable end that you want. My little son's wanting to buy a car. Okay, great.

That's, you need some money for that. And we've been talking about this for, you know, this isn't a new conversation. But he's, you know, trying to help him like, well, where do I need to go to work and what should I do? And, you know, he's like, he wants to work with his hands right now. He wants to do something physical. He's been working at Subway for a year. He wants to do something that's more active than that. Completely understand you're a 16-year-old boy. You want to get out and push a little bit. Great. Go do, let's do that. You know. But then we're looking around, where can you get a job? What can you do? It's hard because when I think about the only place he can get a job at his age is in the food industry, like fast food. Nobody hires 16-year-olds anymore. And so he was going to get a job at the parks department and work on their mowing crew and doing whatever, just outside park maintenance. And then they came back and they're like, oh, our insurance won't cover you.

So you can't have that job. And it's like, that would have been a good job for him. You know, he knows how to run a weed eater. He knows how to run a mower. He knows how to drag brush and like basic stuff. He could be helpful, but they can't do it. Um, and so it's hard to teach kids work ethic and to teach them to do things that are hard when there's like, there's an opposition in our society to resistance, like to having to push through resistance, you know? I like having problems to solve. It's not that I like having problems, but I like solving the problem. I like pushing past the difficulty. Someone tells me no, and I say no is not an acceptable answer. You don't have my yes. I need to go find the person who has yes as their answer. And so I'm going to go find it. And I'm going to have to be creative. And I'm going to have to find what I need. And I'm not going to stop until I find it.

I can be grumpy if you're around me in those seasons. I was with Pastor Eric this last week, and I was trying to find something for our kitchen remodel, and I couldn't find it. And everyone was like, well, we've never even heard of what you're asking for. I'm like, I'm telling you it exists. I don't know what's wrong with you. You're supposed to have this stuff. That's what I'm thinking. I'm like, okay, thank you. Seven or eight phone calls later, I find the right place because it's like, oh, maybe we can just use this other thing. And I said, no, I want this. Indianapolis is the biggest city in this state. There is a warehouse somewhere in this city that has what I want and I'm going to find it. And so, and then we eventually, I call the place. They're like, oh yeah, we know exactly what you've got. We've got a big stack of it out here. Come buy it, you know, come get what you need. Perfect. Like, but I find, you know, work ethic, you know, when customer service, you find a lack, you know, to contrast what I just said. Oh, I'm sorry, sir. We can't, we can't do that.

I'm sorry, that doesn't, well, I'll have to talk to my boss. Well, like the answer is just, well, if it's not right in front of me, we just can't do it. Yeah. Part of having a work ethic is saying like, we're going to figure this out. Right. I have a problem and I'm not going to stop until I have a solution. Right. And there's going to, then that solution is going to require sacrifice. Obviously, you know, it's going to necessarily require some sacrifice, some time, but I'm going to find a solution. I'm not just going to accept, well, it's just the way it is. Fix it. Right. Fix the problem.

I think this relates. I've been working on a project at work, and the custodian we work with, I talked to our relationship manager, and he's like, okay, and I told him, like I gave him the whole list of like, these are all the things I need to know, and I need answers to and clear guidance on. And he's like, okay, well, for these three things, you need to call these people, and these four things, call these people, and then these other things, call this person. And so I started working through. the list and basically we have a service team and then there was a couple other numbers I was given and the other two people were not very helpful and they didn't want to call me back. They didn't follow up very well. And so I ended up calling the service team and I was talking to the guy and he ended up trying to route me back to the same person the relationship manager had. And he's like, is it okay if I just go ahead and transfer you? And I was like, no.

And I'm like, I need someone to take ownership of this situation, and we need to figure this out. And so he stayed with, give him lots of credit, he stayed with me on the phone for a whole hour, finding the answers to these questions, many of which he did not know the answer to at the beginning of the call. And basically, that was the way we got these things resolved, because I had to just force, like... No, like I need somebody to be an adult here and take ownership. And when you talk about work ethic, that's such a crucial part. Because I think when you're young, your tendency is to think of like, okay, this is my job. And my job is to complete this particular task. And as you get older, you start to move away from that mindset of like completing this task and towards a mindset of.

here's the project we're working on. What can I do to move that project along towards completion? And those are very different mindsets. And quite frankly, the moving the project forward mindset is how you get promoted. That's how you advance in your career is having that mindset and not just, oh, well, it's my job to complete this task. I completed this task. I can go home now. Right. Yeah. I've talked to guys about the difference between being hourly versus salary and i say hourly guys are paid to do tasks here's your checklist or your lit like here's here's here are the tasks you're supposed to do if you're and and and you're and you and i think it you can get them done in this amount of time these hours that we're going to pay you to do it a salary guy you know it's like maybe you have to work 30 hours a week to push your to accomplish your goals but you don't you don't hand a salary guy a list of tasks you hand them a list of initiatives of goals of projects and you say

See to that this is done. Get it done. Well, what if I run into trouble? That's why I pay you more than an hourly rate because your job is to figure out the answer to it. And with my best interest in mind, if I'm the business owner. You're going to be taking more responsibility for it. And so if you want to learn, if you want to grow, be a problem solver. And don't make excuses. If you don't understand how to do a job, I think a lot of guys... They don't work hard because some of it, there is actually really a lack of training. We talked before about a lack of fatherhood. They didn't have dads say, no, do it again. No, you screwed it up. Go fix it. And then they hit the workforce, and now the workforce is supposed to deal with this generation of young men that have never been told, you didn't do it well enough. Do it better. If you don't know how to do something, ask.

Boss, I don't know how to do it. And listen. Listen to what they say. And do it. And don't be afraid of saying, if they say, oh, you just this and that and the other. And then you're like, it wasn't helpful. You didn't understand. Then you have to ask, I'm sorry. I was with you up to, I'm sorry, I'm slow. Help me. If you fail, go tell the people that you failed them. Don't let them find it out on their own. No kidding. That was so helpful for me the first time. I don't remember where I first heard or read somebody saying that. They were saying that part of manhood is when you've made a mistake or you've messed things up for the person over you, that you go to them, tell them what you did, and then explain what you're going to do to fix the thing that you messed up if it's in your power to do it. That you're not just handing them a problem.

You're coming to them with transparency, but also saying, and here's what I'm doing to try to fix what I did wrong. Yeah. I mean, these are sort of, we're talking about at the granular level, some of the fruits of people who have a good work ethic. They don't want the failure to metastasize. So they go and they say, hey, man, ran into trouble. Couldn't figure it out. Made this choice. It was the wrong choice. What can we do to fix it? Do you need me to stay late or whatever? Work ethic, I think you mentioned earlier, I think it's the best way to describe it is you just take responsibility for what's going on. You say, I'm going to see to it that this is done. And it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of practice. I said to my kids, we have a lot of chores at our house because we have a big family, big house. And I said, guys, we're training you constantly to do so much. And I know.

that your friends aren't having to do the stuff that you're being made to do because they're still out playing in the street while you guys are getting called in to do all your chores. But you think you're good at this stuff or you've got your way of doing it. I said, we're at the level where the only thing that you've actually taken off of your mother and my plate is taking the trash out to the street on Thursdays. And what I mean is not that they're not competent at other things, but that task has risen to the level of like, I don't think I need to remind you. You will naturally just take responsibility for taking the trash out to the street. And when I said that to them, I wasn't saying, and you are a failure because this is all I can rely on you for. We rely on them for a lot of stuff, but we are involved in it. And what this makes me think of is that if you...

want to make a lot of money, especially, or you want to get promoted, then your boss has to be able to just not even pay attention to you for long periods of time and stuff just gets done. Basically, you're the person who helps other people get their stuff done, not the person who has to be reminded to fulfill their own responsibilities. That's how you get a leadership position. Yeah. Work's going to change for you. Your responsibilities are going to shift. My job as a pastor is so different now than it used to be. Since we've gotten a building, our church has a daycare, we're in the middle of a kitchen remodel. My job is forever changing. What I'm doing, what I'm working on. And some of it's more enjoyable to me than others. It's true of everybody's job. It's true of your wife's work. It's true of your kids' chores.

So, but the Bible says that we should work as unto the Lord. And so whoever you're working for, whatever you're doing, whatever task, you should remember as a Christian, it's a really basic thing to say, but you should know that God's watching. And God, not only is God watching, like, are you doing a good job? But he's watching. And when you give yourself to the work, he's pleased. He's glorified. Even it's a really menial, repetitive task. washing dishes. Like you can wash the dishes. You can be the best dishwasher in the world. And it just means that tomorrow you're going to have to wash more dishes because it's just, it's just a repetitive task. It's just part of life. Um, but he's glorified when you do that menial task that nobody else perhaps sees. Yeah. Maybe even that your boss doesn't see he's glorified by it. And so you should, can't lose sight of that as a Christian that your God sees what you do. And he's glorified by the, the, the things, the, the work that the, the, the,

the care and the love that you put into it. You know, life is not just a list of tasks. So I got to do this and I got to do that. You get to glorify God in the work that you do, however unseen or menial it seems to be. You don't have to be the guy at the top of the food chain, calling all the shots that's to be glorifying God or to be doing what something that pleases him. And so I would say that to mothers, I would say that to. To young men who are doing work and it's like, man, I'm just down in the trenches doing the thing and nobody seems to – God sees it. He's glorified by it. I was reading – I believe it's in Chronicles that there's listing off these people and the things they did. And one of them is – and this guy, and he had charge of the donkeys. Right? And God thought that his charge of the donkeys was important enough to include it in the Bible.

Right? You know, I've never done anything important enough to be included in the Bible. And I think it's just a good reminder that there can be things that are actually really important, even though they seem very pedestrian, very menial, and that God cares about these things. And if we do this work as to the Lord, then we are honoring God. And if you think about, like, if you zoom out and you think about what's important, Like, what's the purpose of your life? It's to glorify God. And so if the thing you're doing isn't flashy or exciting or glorious or maybe even appreciated by society, if it glorifies God, you're still accomplishing your life's goal, even in the menial thing, even if you're taking care of donkeys or whatever it is. And so, like, my urge is to everyone hearing this is that, Let's try to think of the work that we have as important and as the work that the Lord has given us in his goodness for our good and that we can glorify him by doing it and honor the Lord and work as the Lord and not to men. Yeah. I just lost the passage I was thinking of. Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God and in due time he'll raise you up. That when you work, you wait for the Lord to...

lift you up to acknowledge it, to bless it. Because unless the Lord blesses the work of our hands, the Psalms tell us that we labor in vain. And so we need the Lord to bless the work of our hands so that we don't labor in vain. And He will. And He does.