Roles to Fill
As I’ve been listening for direction in this new year, I’m faced with the harsh reality that I have a role to fill.
It’s been easy, with such a willing and supportive wife, for me to treat her and I like we’re both me. In other words, the burden to gather in God’s provision has been equally on our shoulders. For 6 or 7 years now, she and I have both had usually-full-time jobs. It was a suiting combination of rolls… but as we age, I’m learning, so do our roles.
Seven years ago, I dreaded the thought of having kids. Three years ago I welcomed it. One year ago, I started desiring it. My wife on the other hand, has probably wanted it all along and has been subduing those desires in her faithful mission to support me. She made a choice to keep striving with me against the grain of her design.
I realize that I, as a man, will most likely always have projects that drive me and fulfill my carnal ambitions. She will most likely welcome and even greatly enjoy projects as well, but they don’t seem to ever really be a source of fulfillment for her. On the other hand, at least for us, the opposite can be said about raising children. Doing so seems to be rooted in the heart of woman like having a project of some sort is rooted in the heart of a man.
I’m supposed to be the provider. It’s a harsh reality for me after getting away with just pitching in this whole time. While it sounds painful, the actual concept is liberating and empowering. The fun projects that I so desire to grind away at are actually the very things designed for me to receive the provision and other blessings that God offers.
Social and faithless-based distortion speaks lies I have to become a grunt for 40+ painful and weary hours a week. I really enjoy work and realize that before the fall of man, man worked. It’s a fulfillment of who God created me to be, not a fallen state of punishment. The punishment factors in as the “thorns” that come with the “field”. So yes, it is going to be a bit painful if we grab thorns without gloves, and most of us do. They key is to realize we should be wearing gloves out in the field. The key is to start working smarter so that I can work more effectively and step into my responsibility to provide more-effectively than culture dictates. I owe it to Jess and the rest of my future family to not become forever bound up in a never-ending, striving and draining career.
Conceptualizing Gloves for Thorns
Most businesses in corporate America pay employees an offensive income based on what the company is actually making through these “grunts”. This is no secret. It’s common for book authors, the ones who easily spend hundreds of hours creating most of the entire product, to only make about $1 for a books sold through a publisher for say $25. Likewise, cashiers at retail stores may bring in thousands of dollars worth of sales in a given day and still make less than $100.
These are the “thorns” of working, in my opinion. Everyone wants money so bad that the demand, competition and rate at which it’s actually possible to get it, becomes a lifelong mission. Men give their lives to something that “The Man” is really just going to keep for himself in the end. The leftovers (after the “overhead”) are disbursed among those the law requires them to pay.
Well, the only way to avoid the thorns is to put on a protective layer between our work and the piercing of their greed.
Work is supposed to be based on projects that mutually provide. I want to get back to the heart of it, where I grow a cotton field for my village so I get the livestock, food, materials, supplies and other provisions that they produce for me to the same, unified end. Now, given we live in a different world than the one I’m describing, but the principles remain in tact.
The question is “what is my cotton?” What’s something people desire or need that I can provide for them? To me, that is the only ideal business plan. Only then, the profit shouldn’t even be a question. If I can provide such a product or service, I will have more than enough to give a lot, save a lot and still have plenty to live off of. It’s when 10% of the people, doing 1% of the work get 95% of the income that this business formula quickly breaks down, leaving those 90% doing 99% of the work with 5% of what they’ve rightfully earned.
I’m not going to award 5% usefulness with 99% of my profit any more. Nobody says I have to work for big-box-man-5%. While I’m exaggerating my percentages to illustrate the ratios that keep workers in bondage to work itself, my time is just as valuable as anyone else’s. I have just approximately the same amount of it as anyone else and nobody or nothing aside from the Lord and “the law of the land” has the right to tell me who to write the fruit of my time off to.
Practical Glove Ideas
Thankfully, due to the point in time we live in, there’s money to be made in honest trades outside the scope of necessity. I don’t have to grow tomatoes… I’m more likely to be successful making an animated singing tomato for parents to put in front of their kids. The entire evolving world of technology in an impulse-buy-driven market gives me the freedom to dream up something that people may end up wanting, and appeal to their desire for it, pared with an affordability and accessibility to it. There’s nothing wrong with this combination. It’s where the money goes in a culture where most haven’t seen a day when they didn’t have more than enough.
It’s become a whole lot easier to live. Writing nearly effortless when typing letters into an endless text box, compared to running limited ink across expensive parchment and taken by a carrier to its recipient. The same message can be communicated with both means, but the more expensive also happens to be much slower and easily to be intercepted or delayed. That is how things have changed. Money goes to what’s effective, cheap and easy… for providing entertainment, nourishment, exercise and so on. Those who help provide those needs/wants are expected to do so the most effectively, for a relative low cost and make to it as easier than expected. The successful think outside the box, reaching for something new that hasn’t been done…
This is my new goal. I’m going to start looking into what I can do, given technology, talents, resources, relationships and so on, to provide for needs, in order to working smarter for what I earn, and not harder for what I earn someone else. It’s my God-given right after all.