A
story I’ve told my kids is one told by General Colin Powell. As a young man,
Powell had a job mopping the floors at a soft-drink bottling plant near his
home. A story told to him served as his motivation:
There
were once three ditch diggers. The first rested on his shovel and bragged about
one day owning the company. The second whined about the long hours and low pay.
The last digger kept right on digging.
The
years passed, and the first digger could be still found leaning on his shovel.
The second digger had retired: receiving a disability settlement for a fake
injury. Meanwhile, the third digger… owned the company.
Powell
wrote, "The moral is no matter what you do, someone is always watching. So
I set out to be the best mop wielder there ever was. One day someone let 50
cases of cola crash to the concrete, and brown sticky foam cascaded across the
floor. It was almost more than I could bear. But I kept mopping, right to left,
left to right. At summer's end, the foreman said, ‘You mop floors pretty good.’
The next summer, he had me filling bottles. The third summer, I was deputy
foreman. As I have learned, someone is always watching.”
The
Apostle Paul, in Eph. 6:4-8, emphasizes that someone is always watching as
well: God.
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