Doing the Job While It's Easy

There are many ways in which I enjoy hard work. Keeping up with household chores and keeping my office clean are not among them. When I looked in the back yard late last week, though, I knew the time had come to get the rake out and do some work.

Ignoring leaves is not an option in our yard. We have four large oak trees, a young elm, and two large hickorys on a very small lot. That makes for lots and lots of leaves. We also have a large hairy dog that attracts leaves as if he were a great, roving electromagnet—picking up leaves from all corners of the yard while outside, then immediately releasing them from his heavy coat upon entering the house.

In the final analysis, we only get to choose what tool we will use to get the leaves into bags. We can either use the rake and large, cheap plastic lawn bags or we can use the vacuum cleaner with its small expensive bags. While I’m not particularly fond of either kind of work, it’s obviously easier to rake the yard, bag up the leaves, and get it over with than to have the long-term nuisance of leaves dragged into the house a few handfuls at a time.

This past Sunday afternoon the weather was perfect for raking, so out I went to the chore that awaited me. It wasn’t bad work, and it was rewarding to see the progress I was making. I also enjoyed a few breaks in which I played with Luke, our 95 pound electromagnet. (Note to self: I need to do more of that—it’s good for both of us!) Late in the afternoon, I even got a bit of help from my kids as they returned from an afternoon of playing with friends.

By nightfall, I had bagged nearly every leaf in the back yard and, with my helpers, got as many of the bags to the street as the trash collectors will pick up in one week. We even thought to store all the bags upside down so that if it rains, the bags won’t fill with water through the small opening left at the top. “This was so much better than last year,” I thought, “when we battled leaves in the house for a week or two before finally getting the job done. It’s better than last year, when I left the bags in the back yard for months, allowing them to fill with rain and melted ice, making them heavy, wet, decomposing messes by the time I carried them to the street.”

With so many jobs, we either do them right and do them in a timely fashion or we find ourselves with extra work to do in the future. We either control our appetites and get some good exercise every week, or we have a harder diet and exercise regimen down the road to regain our health (or we shave years off our lives from compromised health).

We either clean things up and put them away when we’re finished with them or have a larger mess to deal with later. We either focus in and learn someone’s name well the first time or two that we meet them or have the embarrassment of having to ask them their name repeatedly in the future. We either take care of car and home maintenance needs on a timely basis or deal with costlier and more extensive repairs down the road.

Similarly, it’s easier to learn good stewardship and good money management when the economy is strong or when our responsibilities are few than to try to learn these lessons when we’re overwhelmed with commitments and struggling in a weak economy. (If you still have kids at home, this is also a plug to teach them money management and stewardship now, while it’s just a question of their learning to limit what they spend on their wants.)

When I finished the back yard, it was getting dark and I was ready to quit. The kids, though, had made a great pile that we could have filled 3-4 bags with in pretty short order. I told them it would have to wait; I had done what I set out to do and we could deal with those leaves another day. Well, as I write this, a heavy, steady rain is soaking that pile of leaves, making the job of bagging them a lot more onerous than if I had taken another fifteen minutes last night.

Obviously, this is a lesson I’m still working on—doing each day’s work as it comes, rather than putting some of it off and just making it more burdensome in the future. Sometimes I just need to do things the hard way a time or two to inspire me to do them when they’re relatively easy the next time around.

Grace & Peace,

Dan