Work

“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary,” writes Donald Kendall, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer PepsiCo. Success in life is usually hewn out of a proverbial rock and requires sweat, persistence, faith, tenacity and pride. The unfortunate reality is that many times some lazy loser is waiting on the sidelines to haul it all away, or at least take credit for your hard work. The truth is, we may never see the full fruit of our efforts, but hope and pray that our loved ones will benefit from our toil. If life's ultimate goal is retirement, and then to sit around waiting for our heart to stop beating, I would rather be out there rocking until they peel the guitar away from my cold, dead hands.

Work has such a nasty connotation in our free-loading society. There is an attitude of entitlement that is pervasive in our culture. Several of the government programs meant to help the poor have only hindered folks from getting off of their rear ends and actually becoming a producer rather than a taker in society. I was raised in a hard-working, blue-collar household where you went to work after high school. There was none of this sitting around crap in my home. I left home to play music and, after 6 years of doing so, realized that my future was limited if I didn't have a college education. So, at 25 years of age, and newly married, I re-started my freshman year (first attempt was in 1978, right out of high school) to begin a new 4-year journey as a professional student. Don't get me wrong--I had two part-time jobs as well to provide income for my new family.

Author, Julia Cameron writes, “What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.” This statement, in my opinion, doesn't equate "money comes to us" as wealth, necessarily. The wonderful thing about America is that we have options. Marco Rubio, the newly elected senator from Florida, in his acceptance speech said of his late father,

"No matter where I go, whatever title I may achieve, I will always be the son of exiles and will always be the heir of two generations of unfulfilled dreams...He [my father] grew up largely in a society where what you were going to be when you grew up was decided for you. This is like almost every other place in the world. Think about what that means. That means that before you are even born, how far you're going to get to go in life is decided for you by who your parents are or are not. He was fortunate enough to make it here to America where he was never able to capture his own dreams of his own youth. Instead, he made it the mission of his life to ensure that his children would have every opportunity he did not, that every door that was closed for him would be open for them, that the day would never come for them that came for him: The day when he realized that his own dreams would not be possible, and so now life was about opening the pathways for his children. This story I know well, and it verifies to me the greatness of our country. Because tonight, with your vote, you have elected his son to the United States Senate."

My goal in work is to finish what God has given my hands to do on earth with skill and excellence, to bring Him glory, to provide for my wife and family, and ultimately to leave this world a better place than the one into which I was born.