Ask anyone and they can proudly tell you about the first job they ever landed. It’s almost like a rite of passage into personhood. I stuffed rolls of film in plastic bags and stapled on cardboard toppers for store displays. For my hard work I was paid $1.00 an hour. Mine was considered a white collar office job, I suppose, because Jim Brawner’s blue collar job running TV antenna wire under houses only paid twenty-five cents an hour. But, we both had jobs and we learned how to work.

I remember Dad saying, “Honest, hard work never killed anyone.” I guess that was to differentiate from dishonest work which might get you killed. “If you know how to work, you can learn a job,” he’d say.

Knowing how to work was on our list of things we wanted our kids to understand before they left home. They had all kinds of jobs from waiting tables to mowing lawns. Travis, who’s now a surgeon, got his first job experience cleaning toilets for a resort. Jason, now a camp director, was a life guard at a water park and Jill handed out tokens at a go-cart track. Those were all valuable learning experiences.

Jim’s been a bus driver, a construction worker and a maintenance guy. I was an Avon lady who took orders from my hospital bed after giving birth and I wrapped gifts for a department store where I learned how to make even a cheap gift look expensive. We both collected life skills along the way.

Not all jobs are fun because they all have one thing in common ... work. The sooner that’s realized the better. In our entitlement society it seems more and more of the twenty-somethings are “holding out for management positions.” I even know some forty-somthings doing the same thing. Maybe they should learn to work on their way to that dream job.

”Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.”

~Colossians 3:23

When you know better and do it anyway, I think it’s called asking-for-it. The Friday of Memorial Day weekend is not the time to travel and it’s not the time to even pull in the parking lot of the Super Center. I knew better and I did both anyway.

People get a little crazy and careless on holiday weekends. Just the sheer volume of traffic makes a simple road trip life risking. Television is the only place I have seen a worse accident than I saw yesterday. Two vehicles, a truck pulling a goose neck trailer carrying a backhoe, and a horse trailer were all scattered and smashed so badly it was hard to tell what happened. It added an hour to my trip, but caused me to slow down and remember how fragile life is.

Once I got home I decided to make a quick trip to town. It would keep me from having to venture into the sea of vacationers today. I waited until about 7 to go to Walmart. So did everyone else. The aisles were jammed, products were out of stock, and they were calling for all checkers to report to their registers. I stood for 10 minutes in the express line.

To pass time I read the magazine covers and learned Oprah and her friend Gayle had a screaming match in public, John Travolta and his wife are having twins and three ways to loose weight while eating everything you want.

All of a sudden someone yelled, “WELCOME TO WALMART!” I looked up from my third magazine to see the greeter in his blue vest yell it again. Then someone walked past him to leave and he shouted and pointed to her, “HAVE A GREAT DAY!” He startled a lot people, but made everyone smile. I did.

I finally made it to the cashier. “That guy is sure enjoying his job,” I said. “Oh, he’s new. I don’t know him very well. He does have one thing figured out though. If you have to work you might as well have fun doing it,” she smiled.

Brilliant idea. We all have to work in one way or another, paid or not. There are some things that just have to be done, so you might as well have fun while you do them. Who knows, like the Walmart greeter, you might make someone smile.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men...”
-Colossians 3:23