Monday Meditation

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.  Parker Palmer

My very first job was working in the dish room at a local restaurant.  It was not exactly a glamorous or glitzy position.  I was elbow deep in warm soapy water trying to scrub off bits of food that had been baked on so long it clung to pan like concrete.  Stacks of plates congregated stuck together and cups with bits of leftover coffee (hopefully you are not reading this during breakfast).  It was hard work and I went home exhausted, my fingers wrinkly like a prune after spending hours in water, and smelling a bit like Salisbury steak.  Good times.  I forget how much I was paid, but I remember feeling like I earned every penny.  

On this Labor Day, I invite you to reflect on your first job.  What did that job teach you?  Maybe you delivered newspapers and learned how quiet the pre-dawn darkness can be.  Maybe you worked at a family store or mowed lawns or babysat the next-door-neighbors kids.  Those lessons from our first jobs stick and stay with us.  On this Labor Day, we affirm that where we share our time and talents is important.  We are shaped by our jobs, our co-workers, and bosses.  You will spend 90,000 hours on average in your lifetime at work.  I wonder if that number is increasing given how often we check emails and texts and reports at odd hours.  I wonder if the number of hours we work might be increasing especially as more people work from home where there is no separation.

I love Palmer’s quote above that we need to listen to our lives.  So often we can be lured to a position because of perceived power or prestige or money.  But as theologian Howard Thurman said, “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it!!  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  We may or may not receive a paycheck for what helps us come alive.  Sometimes we work one place and volunteer in the place and with the people who warm our hearts.  Sometimes our paycheck comes from one place while our soul is feed/nourished by what we do somewhere else unpaid.  

I invite you to reflect on the ways work and volunteering has shaped you in good ways and perhaps not so great ways.  May God, who rolled up the holy sleeves and sunk God’s fingers into the earth to fashion and form creation be with you wherever you let your light shine and come alive this week.

Prayer:  Take my gifts and let me love you, God who first of all loved me.