day 2023: Creating Aspirations

“God blesses those who are humble,for they will inherit the whole earth.”

As we settled back to burn off calories from the Christmas dinner by watching TV Sports on Christmas afternoon (humor), I was reminded that in the early days of the NBA playing on Christmas Day that there were players who were disgruntled to have to “work” on Christmas Day.  This year, ten teams played on Christmas Day and players were excited to be able to “play” on Christmas Day.  A full set of generations now aspire to do what their basketball forefathers dreaded.  And, what does that say to us?  Tom Sawyer taught us this a long time ago.  Take a fence that needs to be painted and make the painters feel valued, meaningful and “popular” and they will not only paint the fence, they will do so with pride and enthusiasm and maybe get others want to do the same.  What do we have that we can make the “best of jobs” so that we can have people aspire to perform?

As we say goodbye to 2015 and look forward to 2016, let us remember that in front of us will be many moments at our jobs where we will be asked to do “work” that would not be our first choice in how we want to spend our time and energy.  But, someone else thinks it is and because we work for and with them, we may not get to choose “what” to do, but we get to choose “how” we go about it.  What we can never know is that the “how” we go about our work, could be the example that in the future become the aspirations of others.  When we pay attention to how we accept and work on things that we don’t like, with total humility, we can be making a much larger statement than we know.

Reference:  Matthew 5:5 (New Living Translation)