Today's Devotional

April 27, 2005

Subject:  Get To Work

Proverbs 22:13 - "The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets."

So in the words of my coworkers, "we've had a nice office for the past couple of weeks."  When they said that, I knew that they were talking about the fact that the other bosses were gone and I was in charge.   I also noticed a change in their attitudes.  Though they despise the other bosses somewhat, they see me as a friend.  That was the problem.  

Two days ago, I assembled supporting personnel from Norfolk, Virginia to assist our office in accomplishing a few tasks which needed to be completed urgently.  As we went over the plan on Monday morning, they began to make excuses about why they would need to wait on some additional information before starting the job.  I was not buying it.  I said, "wait, for what?"  They responded, "the information."  I said, "there will be no waiting.  The information is in the system, simply search, retrieve and store the data and get to work."  For the next hour, they came up with excuse after excuse, like "it will take us a really long time to get that information or it will be too difficult to obtain." Finally I had enough.  I sent the personnel to lunch and when they returned, I had done the work, obtained the information and emailed it to them and it had taken me all of 30 minutes.  

Of course upon their return, we had a period of instruction where I talked to them in so many words about slothfulness and finally ended up telling them all, "don't tell me what can't be done until you've tried to do it."

This is often the way we are.  We'd often rather sit back and do nothing because there "appear" to be obstacles or lions outside.  Today, don't let apathy, laziness or slothfulness get in the way.  Get motivated and get to work.  You'd be amazed what you can accomplish in 30 minutes.  

Carlen