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You Can Be An Improver

You Can Be An Improver  -christyfitzwater.com

My girl was home for the weekend, and her husband was quite generous to share her. So we climbed in the car, where I proceeded to talk her ear off. It’s our working arrangement that I talk and she listen with enthusiasm.

We headed to Wal-Mart, which is 10 times more fun if your daughter is with you. At one aisle we paused to giggle, when I stopped talking long enough to ask, “Wait, what did we come here for?”

Soon we were at the fabric counter, because Jayme needed some material for a project. The man who greeted us did not fit the matronly profile of someone I thought should work in fabrics, but he rolled out the yardage with confidence, talking the whole time.

“I got tired of fabric falling on the floor,” he said. “We tried everything –a garbage can, a Rubbermaid container. None of that worked. So I rigged that thing.”

I looked at the end of the counter, and there was a redneck fabric catcher if I ever saw one. It would have made my dad proud. The man had bolted a long wire shelf to the side of the counter.

“Then I was worried that people would run into it when they were walking down the aisle, so I got some duct tape and made sure they could see it,” he said.

Sure enough, a fluorescent strip of duct tape ran the length of the outer edge. You couldn’t miss it.

We watched the man roll out our fabric yardage, and that nifty shelf caught the extra before it could go over the edge over the counter and onto the floor.

“You should call Wal-Mart and have them patent that,” I said.

I have to confess that I think of fabric cutting in Wal-Mart as a pretty mundane job, but that employee gave me the impression that he was all in. He wasn’t just working and getting a paycheck. He was problem solving and making things better in his corner of the work world. That’s inspiring.

I think of Paul’s instruction to the believers:

Whatever you do, work heartily… (Colossians 3:23 ESV)

Are there inventions and improvements we could make in our work stations today? Are there problems we could solve? Ways to make things better than they were before we came to the job?

What does “work heartily” look like for you today?