For Wilshire Baptist Church
The Labors of our Days
We’ve been working a lot of jigsaw puzzles during the pandemic. We usually have one going at our house and one at the house of Thelma Kite, LeAnn’s mother. Thelma gets exasperated sometimes when I walk around the table, pick up a piece, and drop it precisely into place. “Oh, stop that,” she’ll say jokingly, and then, “LeAnn, Jeff doesn’t play fair.”
I’ll admit that I’m pretty good at jigsaw puzzles, but I’m nowhere as good as the puzzlers who compete every January at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival Puzzle Contest. There, the winning time for a four-person team on a 500-piece puzzle they’ve never seen before is usually 25 minutes. It would take me 25 minutes just to get all the pieces facing up so I could get started.
I’ve told Thelma several times, “Nobody pays for this work; there’s no call for it,” and indeed there isn’t. One day when I dropped a couple of pieces into place in quick order and she told me I was being too smart, I said, “I’m not so smart. You know what grade I made in pre-med biology in college? I made a D.”
I never declared pre-med as a major, but I had a great high school anatomy teacher and loved the class, so I thought I’d look into that at the next level. But the college course catalogue must have been lying, or I didn’t read the fine print as I should have, because pre-med biology wasn’t any kind of biology I’d ever seen. There wasn’t a femur, deltoid or liver anywhere in the textbook or lectures. It was all molecules and compounds, which I’d never studied before. I wasn’t smart in that at all, with the result being I front-loaded my GPA with failure. Thankfully, I found my calling in journalism and after four years my GPA was redeemed, although it didn’t matter because nobody ever asked to see my grades.
With biology behind me, I never went on to save any lives as a doctor, medical technician or researcher. Instead, mine was a career of disseminating information that might be useful or at least interesting to people in their daily lives, business endeavors and lifestyle choices. First it was sharing news and stories through a newspaper. Later, I told newcomers to Dallas about the qualities of their new home, airline executives which banks would finance their expensive aircraft fleets, commercial developers who could design and build their office towers and shopping centers, homeowners which neighborhoods and design trends were hot, and commuters how to get around on public transit. All good information to have if you need it, and satisfying work for me, but I never saved a life.
Not like Thelma, who as a nurse no doubt saved some lives. She has amazing stories to tell — from nursing in the days before penicillin and working the wards at the original Parkland Hospital, to working at an industrial clinic where she once dealt with a man whose severed hand was held in place by his work glove. Yes, she saved some lives, and you have to be smart to do that. It also helps if you’re compassionate, and Thelma definitely is that.
We’ve just crossed the seasonal threshold known as Labor Day Weekend, which marks the end of vacations and the beginning of school and getting back to business as usual. But with COVID-19 there’s been no business as usual and there’s no knowing when anything will be “usual” as we once knew it. But there is plenty of work to be done – whether it is studying at home or in school, or working from home or in an office or warehouse, or working on finding new work because your previous work has ended. All of that is important and worthwhile and falls into too many categories to list. And it can’t be ranked from most important to least important either because it’s all important – whether you are saving lives or not. And every type of work takes a certain type of intelligence, and all work requires a measure of compassion – even if the target of your compassion is just yourself for hanging in there and getting it done. Contrary to the jargon of our COVID age, there is no nonessential work. If it is your work, it is essential – given to you by God.
The author of Ecclesiastes wrote: “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil – this is the gift of God.”
Many scholars believe Ecclesiastes was written by King Solomon. He was said to be pretty smart. He definitely was smart about the ways of God and the value of our labors. Don’t know how smart he was at the puzzle table.