Satisfaction in Living 9/12/43

Scripture: I Kings 11: 1-16

Text: I Kings 17: 7; “And it came to pass after a while that the brook dried up.”

A school teacher of many years experience wrote to a certain clergyman asking for his advice and help in words somewhat as follows: “I wonder if you could help me,” she said,” with one of my personal problems. I have been teaching for a number of years, and long ago, all the newness wore off my work. Like most teachers of my age and experience, I have now settled down to a regular and very familiar routine. My difficulty is that I find myself beset frequently by a strange feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction. Some days it seems as if I couldn’t go on teaching another minute. When that mood passes it is followed by a mood of complete indifference toward my job. I lose all interest in it. I realize that such a feeling will be detrimental to the quality of my work, and I have tried repeatedly to conquer it. But it keeps coming. If you could tell me how to master this feeling and maintain a steady interest in my teaching, I should certainly appreciate it.”

The problem that this teacher faced was simply the old familiar problem of keeping enthusiastic about one’s work. Most people meet this problem at some time in life. Often it comes most forcibly in middle life. We are told that it makes no difference what type of work we do, or where we do it, or how successful we are. There are times when a man’s job loses its novelty and original interest, and the man’s struggle to maintain his morale or keep up his spirit begins.

It is no secret that a minister faces this problem now and then. But the minister and the public school teacher and the business man aren’t the only ones who get into these depressed moods. President Eliot once confessed, after many years at his job, that being President of Harvard University no longer held either novelty or fresh interest for him. He even said that nine tenths of his work had become mere routine. It was as dull and monotonous to him as shocking wheat used to be for me as a youth at harvest time.

One would think that a University President would always find invigorating interest in such different parts of his job as raising money for the University, planning its curriculum of study, engaging professors and building new buildings on the campus. But apparently that is not necessarily the case. It would be interesting to know how many bank presidents, public officials, lawyers, doctors, insurance salesmen, editors and overseers as well as field workers, carpenters, stevedores and factory hands feel the same way, at times, as President Eliot said he felt about his job. Probably all of them have days when they would like to run away most anywhere to begin a new career and take up a different line of work.

It is also true that, in the field of domestic life, married people face this problem of restless dissatisfaction at times. There must be many people, who are married and have homes, who experience times when they secretly wonder what it would be like to run away and start again somewhere else.

When two young people are first married they have no such difficulties. They find it reasonably easy to adjust themselves to each other. They find it easy to make sacrifices for each other. They are both interested in the new venture and enthusiastic over their partly furnished house and the home they are trying to build in it.

But as years go on the situation sometimes changes. The children come along. The wedding silver gets dull and the pattern goes out of date. Children force heavy duties on the parents which they never thought of in the days when they were beginning married life. As the changed situation develops, some couples find that devotion changes to drudgery and that their enthusiasm wanes.

Suppose this problem of restlessness and dissatisfaction should be facing some of us today, in one form or another. What can we do about it? Of course the first thing for us to remember is that our moods of discouragement are often the results or by-products of physical fatigue. One of the first ways in which weariness, either physical or nervous weariness, shows itself is in the feeling that our work amounts to nothing, that nobody is interested in seeing that we have done it well, that our past record is insignificant or a failure, and that we simply can’t endure the job another day. When such ideas flash into the mind, a man may safely come to the conclusion that he is simply too tired and that his judgment is unreliable. When a man recognizes these moods and realizes the reason for them, he is a long way on the road toward understanding himself and being able to control himself.

A friend once asked Martin Luther how to master the feeling of discouragement. Luther made this good-humored reply: “Whenever the devil vexes you with such thoughts immediately seek the society of men, or drink more freely, or talk nonsense, or do some hilarious thing. Why do you think I eat as often, drink so much, and converse with such freedom if not to make sport of the devil when he is trying to vex me?”

Of course Luther’s idea that the devil is responsible for our despondent moments might not appeal to the reason of most of us. And his liquid recipe for courage is debatable from several angles. But his words show a shrewd knowledge of life and people. Many of our moods of despair and restlessness have a purely physical basis and disappear when we have rested. We can conquer them by giving ourselves food, taking recreation, or putting ourselves to bed and making ourselves stop talking about it.

It must be recognized, of course, that there are certain people who ought to find a new job and a changed situation rather than to be content with what they now have. It would have meant loss to themselves and to all of us if Abraham Lincoln had remained a rail-splitter and village store keeper, or if Thomas Edison had been satisfied with his job as a telegraph operator and with his salary of $25 a month.

A boy named Aaron Drucker was born in Russia of desperately poor parents. He early decided that he would find a happier existence than he found in and about his home. He walked to Odessa and earned passage to Constantinople only to be sent back by officials at the frontier. Then he walked down into Germany, earned what money he could, and eventually landed in America over fifty years ago. He was practically penniless and knew only a few words in English. He got a job as shirt-packer and then advanced to a job at making shirts. Then he got a sudden ambition. When he was 25 years old he enrolled in a kindergarten and learned the beginnings or elements of the English language. Then he entered a night school and studied hard. Eventually he passed college entrance examinations, was graduated from Columbia College, took post-graduate work at the University of Chicago, and at length won a position on the faculty of Colorado College. Then he was promoted to dean of the college commercial department. At 25, a pupil in a kindergarten; at 50 a tested and competent teacher of men and women! How fortunate that Aaron Drucker did not content himself with a job in a New York sweat shop, when he had talent for heavier responsibility.

But there are many, many other people, hundreds of thousands of them, who must stay where they are, whether satisfied or not, because they have no way of escape open to them. We are told that the wisdom of changing one’s profession or radically changing one’s line of business is doubtful after one has reached middle age. It is also usually questionable when two people who once promised to love and keep faith with each other “till death us do part” hastily decide that they can’t make a go of it any longer and go their separate ways, asking their bewildered children to pay the price of parental failure. For every one who can find a happier way out, there are at least two who must stay where they are and somehow find happiness and satisfaction where they are. Suppose you know, as you face your work and certain things in your home that displease you, that you can not honorably run away and make a fresh start anywhere else. How can you make yourself happy where you are? How can you be enthusiastic over a painfully familiar job? Here are some suggestions.

First: remind yourself occasionally that your job has special advantages and opportunities as well as special difficulties. Most tired people tend to enumerate their hardships only. “Count your blessings.” A carpenter may envy the doctor because of the variety of the doctor’s work or the personal contacts he gets or the bills that he collects. But the doctor just as certainly has moments when he envies the carpenter because the carpenter is through for the day at five o’clock and is not going to have from one to six telephone calls in the night from sick people who want him to come. And the carpenter gets his pay by the hour rather than when people feel like paying up. A nurse may forget when she is exhausted by the demands of a fretful patient, that nursing gives her opportunities for establishing valuable friendships that a factory worker can never hope to make. One’s attitude toward his work may be transformed if he remembers the facts and counts up the pleasurable assets of his particular job. Someone writes, poetically:

I look through others’ windows

On an enchanted earth,

But out of my own window

See solitude and dearth.

And yet there is a mystery

I cannot understand,

That others through my window

See an enchanted land.

Second: we can frequently remind ourselves that our job, whatever it happens to be, can be made a doorway to a greater and better world of interest. One day a practically unknown college professor was approached by a man who condescendingly said, “So you teach Greek!” There was a moment of embarrassed silence and then the professor quietly replied, “No, I teach boys. Greek is what I start with.” Three masons were at work laying stone at the foundation of what was to be a huge building. When asked what kind of job they had, one replied, “I’m working - for seven dollars a day.” Another replied, “I’m laying stones.” The other said, “I’m helping to build the finest cathedral in this country.”

There are two ways of looking at any career. One is to view it as its own blind alley, a “bread and butter” job without thrill, imprisoning your spirit. The other is to see it as a doorway through which you can serve and enrich the world, at least the part of the world where you are.

There are men whose income would allow them to retire with ease and who hate the details of their executive office work yet who keep on managing and holding a concern together simply because the success of that concern means welfare for a whole community and employment for hundreds. There are laborers who hate the monotony of their jobs who will not move to other communities and look for new jobs because they have established homes and made friends and can find more friends where they are.

Third: let us remember that there is always a possibility that one’s work may have unforeseen and beneficial results to others. Who would have guessed that the pioneers who first settled the eastern shores of America, clearing little patches of land and pulling stumps through long and tedious days and weeks and months, fighting for their lives against hostile Indians and bitter winters, would be paving the way for the beautiful cities, the conveniences and the opportunities which we people have since come to enjoy and which we have again had to defend by force of arms.

Fourth: an immensely encouraging consideration is that our present work has been entrusted to us by others who are interested in us. They expect us to do it well. They should not be disappointed. Who are they? Employers - whether shop foremen or electors; associates with whom we work; teachers who have trained us and whose success is measured by the results of our ability. Suppose a man is a bank teller. Officers of the bank have given him their equipment and influence and clientele and reputation with which to work. If he fails to be trustworthy, they are swindled by his disgrace and his children will be stigmatized by a merciless society as offspring of a thief. Perhaps our loved ones depend on us most of all to make good.

The lighthouse on one of the reefs in New York harbor had been tended for years by a widow, Mrs. Katie Walker. One day a reporter asked her for her story. She said: “I was living at Sandy Hook when I met my husband. He took me to that lighthouse as his bride. I enjoyed the work there, for the light was on land and we could keep a garden and raise flowers. But then we were transferred to this light on Robbins Reef, surrounded by water. The day we came, I said, ‘I can’t stay. The sight of water wherever I look makes me too lonesome.’ I refused to unpack my trunks and boxes, but somehow after a time they got unpacked and I’ve been here nearly forty years.

One night my husband caught a heavy cold while tending the light. It turned into pneumonia, and they had to take him to the infirmary on Staten Island. One evening, while I sat there tending the light in his place, I saw a boat coming. Something told me the news it was bringing. I expected the words I heard coming up out of the dark: ‘We’re sorry, but your husband’s worse.’ ‘He’s dead,’ I answered, and they made no reply. We buried him on a hill on the mainland where I can see his grave. Every morning when the sun comes up I stand at this porthole and look there. Sometimes the hills are green, sometimes they are brown, sometimes they are white with snow. But they always have a message for me. Something I heard my husband say more often than anything else. Just three words: ‘Mind the light!’”

Who could disappoint a trust like that? To remember our special advantages, to look for the doorways, to have confidence in our service to others, to remember that others believe in us, should send refreshing water tumbling over the driest brook bed of our spirits.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wailuku Union Church, February 15, 1931

Kahului Union Church, February 22, 1931

Puunene Japanese Church, March 8, 1931

Paia Japanese Church, December 6, 1931

Kahului Union Church, January 7, 1934

Pauwela Hawaiian Church, January 21, 1934

Puunene Hawaiian Church, January 28, 1934

Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, January 31, 1937 AM

Wisconsin Rapids, September 12, 1943