Working Hard?

 

“You know,” the older gentleman sitting across from me said.  “I was talking to a neighbor of mine (he's  an older farmer) the other day and he told me that he just ploughed one hundred acres.”

“Oh?”  I said, absently.

“Yup,” he said.  “I told him he didn’t do anything of the sort.  The tractor did the ploughing and he just sat on it.  It took time, but not effort.”

“I guess you let him know, didn’t you,” I said.

“Sure did,” the man said.  “We were at a farmer’s market the other day and this lady was talking about all the honey she’d produced this last year.  Well, I told her that was nothing to be proud of – why, the bees did all the work.  Now, if she had really made the honey herself, well, that would have taken some real talent.”

“You’re pretty good at letting people know when they are taking credit for someone else’s efforts?”  I asked.

“Oh, they know I’m joking,” he said.

I laughed and yet, I wonder how these comments are received.  It is awfully easy to be critical of other people’s effort or lack thereof.  We grow up on the cloud of the knowledge that we have it so much easier than the generations that came before us.  They are quick to let us know how much harder things were in the "Old Days."

When I got into medical school and waded through the challenges that med school offers and after that, on into residency, my mother (who is also a doctor) told me about how much easier I had it than she did.  She did more frequent call nights.  She had to draw her own blood for lab tests and run them down to the lab herself.  Truly, I didn’t know the meaning of hard work.

Now the shoe is on the other foot.  Residency has gotten easier in the 23 years since I completed it and now, I could say that the resident physicians have no idea what hard work really is.  Even if I could say that, I wouldn’t because it isn't true.

The question really isn’t whether people are working as hard as each other or past generations, but whether they are doing their best and fulfilling the tasks set before them.  There are no medals given to residents who stay up for 36 hours straight, nor special awards for farmers who plow a field with a team of oxen rather than a tractor.

Colossians 3:23 tells us, “Whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not to men.”

Clearly, we are to work hard, but I suppose there is no reason that we have to do something the hard way – even if once upon a time our grandparents did it that way, and they survived.  There is no reason to pit the efforts of one generation versus another generation.  

More than that, we don’t need to judge the effort someone else is putting in.  They know if they are doing their best and that should be good enough -- even if they happen to use bees to produce honey, rather than gathering the pollen by hand and making honey by hand the way real honey farmers do.