Good Old-Fashioned Work

There is a song in my Patch the Pirate book that we like to sing a lot these days. The chorus goes “Good old fashioned, callous makin, backbone breakin work. That’s the secret formula it’s plain hard work. I work all night, I work all day, I’m up with the morning sun, cuz nothing brings me satisfaction like a job well done.” That about describes our life right now, lots of plain hard work, with plenty of satisfaction to go along with it.Rainy season is just starting here, so it has been rather necessary to get the house finished. It seems like it is taking a long time, but every bit of this house is built by hard work and a machete. If you want a wall for instance, you go and cut down the right size of bamboo, cut it to length, trim all the roughness from the outside, then split it with a machete. Then you can do a bunch more work and finally put your wall in place. It is hard to describe the process, but let’s just say that it costs blood, sweat and tears. (Well…the tears only come when cooking over the fire, or cutting onions so far, but plenty of blood since I keep cutting myself with the machete!)Take yesterday as an example. We had three projects that had to be done. Roy is building the outhouse, so he and Hannah were assigned to that task…which includes sifting gravel out of the sand at the creek, getting sand out of the creek also, then mixing the cement by hand, and then pouring it into the bamboo and banana leaf form. Jason was building a “car port” onto the house. We needed a place to hang our laundry when it is raining, and split fire wood and stuff like that, so this addition was rather essential. He had Memewah as his assistant. My job was to split bamboo ties for the roof, with Meme to help me. I was really happy about that, since I FINALLY got the knack of doing it, and now I can do it really fast and well. Next time the villagers come to watch me cut bamboo ties, I will not be at all ashamed like I was before. At the end of the day, we were all worn out, but so incredibly happy and satisfied with our accomplishments.I was reading in the Ministry of Healing the chapter about “Mind Cure”. And I realized that when I was praying over my damaged little girls, God heard my prayers and put us where they can recover and heal from their problems. All this hard work in the open air and sunshine, with the birds singing and the monkeys chattering is like a healing balm to their souls. Having to work together as a family is so good for them. Yesterday Hannah was having a bit of an attitude problem, and so I talked to her about how we have to work together if we are going to be warm and dry during rainy season, and even though just four years old, she got the idea and could not do enough for the rest of the day to pull her own weight with the work. That in itself is enough to reassure me that God is leading and guiding.Work…there is plenty of that to keep us busy for a good long time. But the more important work is what is being done in our hearts by living so close to nature and nature’s God. It gives us new enthusiasm for reaching out to those around us, and spreading the good news that Jesus is about to come back to take us to our eternal home.