First a clarification:
One of my favorite LDS hymns is “Have I Done Any Good?” It is a happy song, with a biting message that we need to get busy. (Hymn 223)
Have I helped anyone in need?
Have I cheered up the sad and made someone feel glad?
If not, I have failed indeed.
Has anyone’s burden been lighter today
Because I was willing to share?
Have the sick and the weary been helped on their way?
When they needed my help was I there?
Then wake up and do something more
Than dream of your mansion above.
Doing good is a pleasure, a joy beyond measure,
A blessing of duty and love.
Opportunities right in our way.
Do not let them pass by, saying, “Sometime I’ll try,”
But go and do something today.
‘Tis noble of man to work and to give;
Love’s labor has merit alone.
Only he who does something helps others to live.
To God each good work will be known.
What did I tell you? Inspirational and motivational. Now, see that last line? The one that says “To God each good work will be known?” It wasn’t like that before. Somebody tweaked it. (It isn’t the only song that got tweaked: Link here.)
Here’s what it used to say:
“Only he who does something helps others to live.
The world has no need for a drone.”
And that’s what is embedded in my head whenever I hear the song. And shall be, for time and all eternity.
Why am I thinking about drones? It has nothing to do with politics or terrorists. It has to do with summer. And teenage boys. (And, maybe girls in your case)
You see, drones are male honeybees. They are bigger than the female “worker bees.” But they don’t do anything. They don’t work. Most drones live their entire lives without actually accomplishing anything. Meanwhile, the female worker bees are out gathering pollen, building the hive, taking care of the baby bees, or making honey, etc. The drones just hang out.
No really – they hang out. They even leave the hive and hang out together in groups. With itty-bitty skateboards. (OK, I made the skateboard part up.) They hang out together in the corner of the hive and play little tiny drone video games. (I made that part up too.)
I am a guy, and I have four sons, making me an expert in drone-like behavior. You know, the rolling out of bed at 11:00am, and wondering where everybody is. The sitting in front of a video game for hours on end. Hanging out in the driveway with the skateboard. You know – drone-like.
Only two of my boys are left at home. One is a natural early riser, and after me, he is the first one up. Yesterday, he was up at the crack of dawn building a fort. He is the kid who taught himself how to make duct tape wallets, and sold them at elementary school to make money. FOML4 is not inclined to wake up early, but I hear his alarm go off so he can get to work on his online summer school class. As of right now, neither of my boys are buying into the drone behavior.
I asked a friend of mine who is a mission president what is the #1 thing I should do to prepare my kids to serve: (Link here.)
“Make sure they know how to work hard. Tough physical labor. Make sure they can get up early in the morning and work hard all day. This generation of youth does not know how to work hard. They plan on serving a mission their whole life, they get here, and realize that it is hard work, and they can’t do it – so they want to go home. It happens all the time. Make sure they know how to work hard before they get out in the field, and it will be a great blessing to them.”
And he’s not the only one. It is becoming brutally obvious that many of our missionaries do not know how to work hard enough to serve well. Last night on Facebook, a few of us were discussing this, and there were others who had heard the same thing.
We do a disservice to our sons, and daughters, when we let them be summertime drones. Many kids have convinced themselves, and us, that school is so demanding that they “need a break.” Demanding? School? Just you wait! Nevermind the concept that 9 months of work somehow merits a 3 month vacation. Interesting preparation for real life! Or for missions.
In a discussion with a young man the other day, he actually said that he is training to become a professionally sponsored video gamer. Good luck with that. Other kids I see leaving on their missions have never actually held a paying job. They’ve never had to get up, go to work, put up with co-workers they don’t like, or a demanding boss. Can you be a good missionary without ever having a job. Yes. Is it less likely? Yes.
The year before the FOML3’s mission, he worked a difficult warehouse job. He would drag himself out of bed at 6:00am, and head to a job that he disliked, do hard work in the heat with a bunch of non-English speaking co-workers, and return home exhausted. I loved every minute of it.
In the meantime, if our kids are still asleep as we read this, we are doing them a great disservice, and denying them blessings. Especially now that the mission age is younger – reducing the time the kids have to develop a work ethic and make money.
Read what L. Tom Perry said about working before your mission.
“Let me offer a simple suggestion: get a job that involves interacting with people. As an increased motivation, set a goal to earn enough money from your part- or full-time work to pay for at least a significant part of your mission. I promise great blessings—social, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual blessings—to every young man who pays for a significant part of his mission.” (Link here)
Yes, you read that correctly. An Apostolic promise. Who wouldn’t want that for their missionary!
My dad (mission president and now MTC president) has said MANY times that you can tell a HUGE difference many times between the missionaries that earned money for their mission and those that didn’t. From the START they are more dedicated. Obviously their are good missionaries in both sides, but they start their mission more invested in it.
I am first to admit that it is tougher than it used to be. Summers are shorter, school is more demanding, there are more sports and extra-curicular activities to distract and give the illusion of work. There are far fewer jobs for young people, and more people fighting for those same jobs. It is much more difficult.
What does that mean? It means it is more difficult.
What does that mean? It means get out of bed and turn off the TV.
Have I done any good in the world today?
The world has no need for a drone.
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As a longtime beekeeper, I can’t help but to make a small observation. Everyday drone behaviors seem pretty useless; and most of it is. The females indeed do all of the work in the hive, and come fall, they will take each drone outside on a murder suicide mission…never to return. (This saves on food storage.) Regardless of their perceived worthlessness, drones have a very important job. Not only do they keep the species going, they lose their life in the process when their “importance” gets ripped out and continues working inside the newly fertilized queen as the dying, little drone body falls back to the earth.
My point is, as we work to help our youth learn to work, one never knows which drone will suddenly come alive (motivated)and live out the critical purpose for which they were created. That awakening is a beautiful thing to witness. Hopefully, they will live through it.
Interesting comment. I did know that about drones, but couldn’t help but wonder how many of the drones actually are able to fulfill their purpose. Do you have any idea? It seems to me that most of the drones sit around waiting for “Something big to happen” but it never does.
It is interesting to me that in many wards and stakes we claim that we see the need for youth, especially priest-age young men, to have jobs–but then develop summer youth programs with high adventure and youth confference without paying any attention to those jobs, and without counting as the “cost” of such activities the lost income. I was very grateful to the priests quorum that held its high adventure nearby, so that my employed son could balance work and the activity and participate in just half of the week.
So love this post. And your blog. I share your comments and your posts many times in my family. I’ve already implemented your advice for our youngest daughter, age 15. We worked on getting her a summer job back in March before she had to compete with all the other college and high school students. One of our goals was to find a job that supported the concept of a Sabbath. Chick-Fil-A. Yep, she got a job there, has Sundays off, and her fellow workers are clean-cut, upstanding young men and women. She has been a 4-H member since she was 8 years old, raising hogs and selling them at auction. All her proceeds go into her account earmarked for college. Her work proceeds are also going into her college fund. Do we have the money to pay for her college and mission? Yes, we do. But us just paying for her wouldn’t mold her into the person that she needs to be to be able to withstand what the next 60 years of life on earth is likely to be like. She already has a stake in her future since she is personally putting her earnings into it. Thank you again for this post. And looking forward to the next one . . .
Agree 100%. All three of my boys are hard workers but learned that ethic in slightly different ways. Bottom line – to be an effective missionary, husband, father, employee in future career – one HAS to develop a work ethic. We used to make our kids prepare a task list for each day (since they left to their own devices during the summer). I still have one of my youngest’s lists from when he was about 6:
Brush teeth
Shower
Pet hamster 7 times
25 pushups
Kid is stellar with his time management as an adult.
Very good post, thanks for your insight MMM 🙂 We’re a ways off still from having kids that are working age, but I’m sure it’ll be here before I know it and I like reading all these good posts to store in the back of my mind for the near future.
This is really hard for me. We are currently living in China, so my son doesn’t have an opportunity to get a part time job. In addition, the owners of the apartment we are renting insisted that we employ their housekeeper to clean. So it’s really tough finding ways for my son to work. But I really believe in this principle. I’m considering buying a gentleman’s farm when we return to the U.S. so that we will have plenty of work for him to do!
My son who returned recently from Taiwan said it was so clear who the gamers were in his mission. They were more socially awkward and less conditioned to the rigors of missionary service. We need to turn off the video games. They’re turning kids into drones.
Well I got up at 6:30 this morning – an hour and half after my husband and five oldest daughters, all who went out to bale (my husband did) or rake hay (my daughters did). My teens often tease that they love when school is back in session because they get to sleep in for seminary. 🙂
Doing hard physical labor is good for the body and the soul – and sweating playing a game of basketball or soccer doesn’t count as hard physical labor. I am so grateful we have a lifestyle that makes it easy to teach this to our kids. I’m also grateful to my parents who found ways to teach this to me and my siblings growing up when our lifestyle (my dad is a doctor) could have easily made us drones.
As a funny side note about drones, our homeschool is called Beehive Academy. My oldest daughters, ages 4 and 5 at the time, wanted to learn about bees for school. When they learned all the worker bees were girls they wanted to name our homeschool Beehive Academy because “You are the queen bee mom and all we have are girls and we work hard!” I tried to explain that dad worked hard too but they couldn’t see past all the girls in our house. When sons finally came to our family we still kept the name and used this quote from Pres. Faust as kind of our family motto, which incidentally also applies to this post about work:
“Work is another deterrent to evil. The symbol of Utah is the beehive. Our forefathers fostered industry and work. Elder John Longden, an assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, quoted Herndon as saying, “Satan selects his disciples when they are idle; Jesus selected his when they were busy at their work either mending their nets or casting them into the sea.” . . .May we dedicate our lives to serving the Lord and not worry about offending the devil.” (from Sept. 1995 Ensign, emphasis added by me)
I love that Pres. Faust points out that work is a deterrent to evil.
Ha! I loved this post! It is for this reason exactly that my husband and I dream of owning about ten acres so that our kids have to do physically demanding labor: moving pipe, hauling hay. My husband grew up a farm boy doing exactly that kind of work, and do you know what his mission president wrote his parents about him? “He is a work horse!” I value his work ethic so much. I didn’t do hard physical labor, but my parents were part-owners in a grocery store, so I had a job from the time I was fourteen. And it was so good for me. My littles are seven and under, and so I’m just struggling with motivating them to do housework right now. No fun for me, but worth the hassle if I can help them be motivated, productive people!
It is always interesting to “hear” other people’s opinions on this blog. I guess what I would contribute here is gratitude: Thank you MMM for pointing out things that would not normally be had in conversation. Good insights, thoughtful reminders, and great inspiration for new mothers like me. Like all things in the Gospel, truth is there and so are principles. It is when we start assigning practices with these principles that we tend to get into trouble. For the previous comment about how hard it is to find work for youth: Maybe your children had it hard, maybe they couldn’t find work. For others, they didn’t have the same experience. But that wasn’t the point, at least what I found. The point was the principle of work and how important it is in our lives as parents, children, members of the LDS Church. It is a principle that will continue to be present throughout our whole lives. It starts young, with chores in the home, and continues throughout eternity really. Just like the prophetic promise, if our children desire to find opportunities, they will find them, because they “seek and find” and will be blessed in all aspects of their lives.
Again, much gratitude for the thought and principle taught today. It has surely uplifted my spirits.
My boys are asleep as I read this. But they are taking afternoon naps. They were up at 6 this morning. (They are both under 3.)
I still think the last line “The world has no need for a drone” every time I sing that song. Hubby and I also like to sing “You who unto Jesus, for refuge have fled.”
Back to the subject. My kids worked at an amusement park last summer, they were ages 14 and 17. They did work some Sundays, but could usually give away their shifts. I don’t LIKE them having to work on Sunday, but the fact that they did occasionally work Sunday helped them to realize how much they missed regular Sunday worship.
One thing that is difficult is getting kids to WANT to work. My 14 year old worked because she wanted to go on a Science trip to Florida, and we required her to earn some of the money. It was a good experience and if nothing else, a motivation for higher education!
This year my boy is on a mission, and my girl is teaching Karate (she is 15.) She is realizing that having a skill an earn her higher wages!
I know it’s hard, but there are jobs to be had. Many employers will work around a kid’s schedule if they are a good employee. Sometimes you have to give up things too. We didn’t get a family vacation last year, but my kids learned a lot.
I love this! I swear my husband and I will have discussions and you never fail to post on the same topic within a few days! I have 4 sons. The oldest (twins) are 8. The youngest is 2. We already have this very thing on the front of our minds. Thank you!
Growing up in Kansas, I was able to work a fast food job in high school that gave me Sundays off. Why? There were plenty of other people willing to work on Sundays and I was a good worker. When I worked at that same fast food job in college in Provo they let me have Sundays off for a while, then they changed the policy. The point is, I think it is almost easier to find a no Sunday job outside of Utah. Maybe it was because I was the third one in my family to work there, but my national franchise job was very willing to let me take off for youth conferences, basketball season, family things. They probably wouldn’t have the first month, but once it was established that my siblings were good workers, it wasn’t a problem. Were the people I worked with the cream of the crop? Probably not, but some were great.
This has been on my mind all week, yet here I am in the mid-afternoon reading blogs in my pajamas.
You are definitely inspired.
I totally agree that setting goals and working hard toward them is crucial mission preparation. But here is the dilemma (at least out here in the mission field) for youth with jobs. It is nearly impossible to find a job that will give you Sunday off, plus youth activity night off and certainly they don’t usually allow you the hours off to play a sport, perform in the band or be on the school newspaper, Jobs also aren’t usually keen to let you have the week off for scout camp, girls camp, EFY, family reunions. Also at least in our area working often puts you in the company with those young people that are not taking advance classes, not participating in extracurricular activities etc. And sadly it also tends to put you in the company of young people with cash to burn and substance usage issues (drugs, alcohol, cigarettes). So while learning to work hard through employment is a great idea it is one that needs to be entered into judiciously with much prayer. And for those LDS business owners that can find ANY good, hard, honest work for LDS youth to do that will honor the many other good activities that can be crucial– let’s give these kids a job.
I agree it is difficult – and the demanding church commitments make it even harder. But some of those things – sports, marching-band, and many extra-curricualr activities – are really just organized playtime, or socially based. Sometimes we have to sacrifice and make hard choices.
I have never heard a prophet counsel youth to be in a school club or sports team to prepare for a mission, but I have heard them counsel them to get jobs.
In high school my cousin went door to door asking people if he could mow their lawns. He would only ask for $10, but people often tipped him $20 more because he did a better job than many professionals. He never needed to work Sundays, and regularly made over $100 for each days worth of work. By the end of the summer he had a group of friends working under him. Retail and fast food aren’t the only options for teenagers. Sometimes we need to make our own work.
I had my first official job when I was 12- washing dishes at a restaurant, and had to pay for my own school clothes and personal items ever since then. I never stopped working since. Thankfully- my children are much smarter than me, and do computer programming for money now.
It’s not just knowing how to “work.” Many kids work hard in school. They study hard and budget their time and get good grades. But it’s the sustained physcial labor that matters, as you point out. Missionary work is hard physical work.
I think there are some parents who are so happy to have their children serve, they’ll do anything to get them there. As much as I understand that inclination, it may not serve our future missionaries well.
We have in our extended family one family unit that had three missionaries at once — on a very limited family income. The first missionary graduated college before she served, and she mostly was supported by her ward, with some contribution from her own work. The second worked before she went and saved every penny of her mission expense herself before going. The last left after his freshman year at BYU; he was supported by his family.
Each took a different approach; each prepared differently. Would it have been better for the last to wait to earn more of his own money before serving? Maybe. Maybe not.
This thing is true for all three of them, though: they learned at their parents’ knees to work — to work in the house, to work around the house, to work at school, and to work at jobs.
I never did much understand boredom. Not in my children, not in myself, and certainly not in my adult children. There are so many things to DO. . . taking an hour off to ‘drone’ is really a treat, who has time to be bored?
Well done once again MMM.
Even as a missionary, you could see a huge difference between those who knew how to work and those who didn’t; those who had to work with people regularly, those who had to work long days and hard hours, those who contributed monetarily to their missions, and those who didn’t. You knew the missionaries who were promised some grand prize when they finished, or whose parents paid for the whole thing without any expectation but that their child go and come home 18-24 months later. It was irritating to be companions with those missionaries, or have one as a district/zone leader.
There were some that worked very, very hard, even if mommy and daddy spoiled them relentlessly. Sometimes they’d take their companions to lunch every day. But they worked hard. They had testimonies in the work. Their goal was to please God and bring His children into the fold. I loved working with them.
Love it. The reason I went back to school to be a music therapist in my mid-forties was that I recognized drone tendencies in myself and I wanted to make sure that I had a reason to get out of bed when our kids left home. And it worked!