216--Schlepping

General asked me how I like my job.

I love my job!!!

In a down economy, when people are enduring 24-month stretches without employment, I arrived here on Friday and started work the following Monday. Because of relationship. They say it's all about who you know. I say it's all about who knows you. Stevie Whited and Jeff Meader and Tim Moore and Melissa Fredrickson combined their good will toward me with the providential result that I have a job.

Today I'll schlep 50-pound boxes from table to pallet, from one pallet to another, from the ground up to a stack at full reach of my vertical extension. These are taxing movements on the body. Resistance causes strengthening. Other people pay to go to the gym--I get paid.

Today I'll learn new software operations and internal company protocols. I'll forget things and make mistakes and course-correct or submit to the watchfulness of someone less absent-minded. It's an exercise in presence. I have to focus and stay right there in that moment, concentrated on the particular task in front of me.

Sure I'm excited about the possibility of traveling to Arizona this weekend, but today, for the next 11 hours, my hands belong to cardboard and wine, 50 pounds at a time. Whatsoever your hands are doing, give it all you got.

I told General I've loved all my jobs. Not only because I've always seemed to work with amazing people, but because I've really only ever had one job--Music Facilitator.

The titles vary, and the uniform, but the job is the same: When I'm calling bingo numbers, I'm getting money so we can eat and pay rent so we can live and be strong so we can make music. When I'm coordinating and producing a video shoot or a film project, I'm earning value so we can gain resource so we can continue the dance of making music.

This year He continues to pull the curtains further back. It's not the music that I love so much--it's the connection that it fosters between us. Between me and Him. Between me and you. Between us and Him. It's the meeting place, the common ground. That the common ground is the holy ground, this is what intrigues me.

To stand in that place, to dwell there, I would do what it takes, with a smile. I would schlep boxes today, and love it.

photo by Julie Kim

Have a great day, Beautiful...

Shoulder up, Strender