Do It Well

Anything worth doing 

Is worth doing well

There is some debate as to the wording and origin of this idiom. Was it Aristotle or Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield ? I guess it's really not that important. Suffice to say, my parents, second generation Americans, were motivated by the quote’s application. They weren’t college educated but they were schooled in hard work. Work well done was a lesson they taught me and my siblings at a very early age.

My brothers and I all worked at some various jobs, through high school: paper routes, shoveling snow, cutting grass in the neighborhood — an unquestionable work ethic was rooted in us. Once, I recall my mom walking down the street to evaluate a neighbor's lawn that I had just mowed. She was not happy with my work-product and made me cut, edge and rake the entire yard, a second time, for free.

These personal experiences and my upbringing got me to thinking about a young Jesus — what did that look like?  In seminary I had several courses based on the life of Christ.  I’m still stunned by the fact that we know virtually nothing of what Jesus did from roughly the age of 12 til the age of 30. What happened to Jesus? He all but disappeared from the scriptures for nearly two decades. The gospel writers drop incidental details about His family and life before His ministry. For instance, Matthew 13:55-56 contains the puzzled questions of Nazarenes dumbfounded by Christ's preaching: "Is this not the carpenter's Son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this Man get all these things?" Joseph's normal occupation was as a carpenter, a builder, probably one who worked in both stone and wood. Jesus was, by most estimates, simply the son of and a local wood worker. 

The custom during this time, maybe 27-30AD, was that Jewish men would prepare and study Torah. In this case it's kind of an oxymoron, seeing as Jesus was present when it was written, nonetheless He was preparing to teach. Consider this from John’s Gospel: Nicodemus, a prominent leader came to Jesus one night saying: “Rabbi, we all know you’re a teacher straight from God. No one could do all the God-pointing, God-revealing acts you do if God weren’t in on it.”

My simple conclusion, maybe more of  a hypothesis is this: The son of God spent decades simply going to work and doing his job well. So that when the time came for woodworker to impact the world He was ready.

There's a life lesson here for each of us; 
let that percolate…#Pkes
 #MetroLifeChurch #MinistryinMotion