Suli adjusted her breather, coughing at the acrid scent of smoke. “Drake’s breath, if the Princes are gonna make us take shifts in the Nursery, they could at least make sure our equipment works.”
Derk grunted, heaving a load of coal into the nearest furnace. He wiped his face on a grimy sleeve, accomplishing little more than depositing an extra layer of black on his forehead. “Almost hatching season, it is,” he observed. “Wouldn’t wanna offend the Guardians for the sake of us lowly stokers.”
“As if the beasts needed all that much minding. Seems to me they destroy castle property just fine all by themselves.” Suli sniffed and immediately coughed again. She slammed the furnace door unnecessarily hard, creating a mournful toll that shivered dust onto their heads from the low stone ceiling.
Derk stopped short, peering into the darkness beyond the flickering bulblight. “Hey, did you hear that?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, control myself or I’ll bring down the tunnels.”
“No, listen.” A muffled scratching grew louder as the ringing of abused metal faded. A faint glow crawled through the gloom, formless until a sudden burst of sparks accompanied an unmistakable hiccup.
“Now how’d you get down here?” Derk mused, inching toward the tiny winged creature still dripping with albumin.
Suli’s hand fell from adjusting her mask yet again, cough forgotten. “No way! Derk, it’s our lucky day!”
The mustard tree is a fascinating plant. Its tiny seed is one of the smallest in the world, and must be collected by soaking the pit of the mustard fruit for several days and then straining the resulting pulp through a cloth. The seed germinates quickly but grows incredibly slowly. Its most rapid growth occurs when planted near a water source; its roots seek out water, sensing it and growing toward any source, even breaking through pipes or well walls to access it. However, the tree can live and thrive on less than 8 inches of rainfall per year in some of the hottest, driest climates on Earth. The hotter and more consistent the sunlight, the healthier the tree, and clay that grows little else nourishes it. The leaves resemble those of succulents, and are often consumed for their moisture by desert animals and people. When in dryer conditions the mustard tree may only grow to about six feet tall, but in wet environments will grow up to 25 feet, an imposing sight.
On three separate occasions Jesus explained the power of faith using the image of the mustard seed. He said that even faith as small as a mustard seed could do such impossible things as moving a mountain from one place to another or uprooting a mature tree to plant it in the sea. I have known the analogy all my life, but grasping such a thing is difficult when we tend to think of big and small as opposite limits of size.
God doesn’t think in limits. Just as a day and a thousand years are the same to Him, big and small hold no meaning in a physical sense. Instead, he sees potential. The tiny mustard seed has no strength of its own, no power to impress our human sensibilities, yet in the harshest, most unexpected conditions, life can be induced to spark within it. The germs of faith wake under similar circumstances. Like the mustard tree, faith does not become full overnight. It grows, millimeter by millimeter, over a lifetime. It can outlast some of the hardest circumstances life can throw at it, although often in hard times it merely exists, eking out drops in desperation but not finding enough to grow any larger. When the nourishing rain of an answered prayer, an encouraging word, a relief from a trial arrives, it grows again and fills new leaves with nourishment to hold in reserve for the next difficulty.
Also like the mustard tree, the roots of faith reach out endlessly with insatiable need. Faith knows its source, and will move in that direction only no matter what gets in the way. It cannot be stopped; even when we feel like we are barely hanging on, faith looks for any sign of God in the darkness and dirt of life and drinks it thirstily. If there were no water to be found, the tree would die – it cannot manufacture its own nutrition – but those roots can find and use any trace of moisture. Faith without nourishment would be nothing -a shriveled, rotten trunk – but unlike water God is always there to be found.
When Jesus’ disciples woke Him in the storm, He told them their faith was weak and small but He still stopped the storm. When they failed to cast out demons in His name He told them their faith was weak and small but He still cast out the demons. When a man begged for healing for his son and said he wanted to believe but needed help making faith stronger, Jesus healed the man’s son. When Moses hid in the wilderness for forty years because what he thought he was supposed to do for God failed, God became fire in a bush and told him he was chosen for a purpose because of his faith. How many more have been planted while tiny and insignificant, then nourished by God’s eager help into trees of faith to feed and harbor weak and searching souls?
“It’s like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the sky nested in its branches.” Luke 13:19 CSB
God will feed any faith we are capable of placing on Him, including the mere desire to have faith. Are you a mustard seed? How high will you grow?
When people ask me what grades my children are in, I have to stop and think where they would probably be assigned in the public school system based on their age, because we don’t level our homeschool in that way. Homeschooling multiple children of varying ages more strongly resembles the one room schoolhouses of 150 years ago than any modern classroom. Learning occurs based on developmental readiness rather than on arbitrary divisions.
We also don’t really divide our education into disconnected subjects. Mathematics tends to be set apart for the moment because numbers have never been my forte, and needing help means we need some sort of curriculum. However, the principles of logic, reason, and spacial relationships naturally form the foundation for learning everything else. And without the enforcement of artificial boxes, even the smallest question can lead to a full educational experience.
For example, my ten year old chose a project about games played during the 1940s from an available suggestion list. I had him write down a handful of questions he wanted to answer on the topic, starting with the obvious “what” question. Before I knew it, he had chased the game of hopscotch back to the Roman empire, learned how to build an early version of pinball from scraps, and followed the game of chess to ancient China.
Because there are no subject divisions or levels to pass, there are no tests. Without age-assigned levels, there are no time limits, so there is no need for scored work. With enough time to practice a skill or explore a concept, mastery or at least comprehension can be reached, therefore failure is never ultimate. Without the randomized sets of skills and concepts assigned to each level, education becomes about the process of learning rather than about deadlines. The mind is trained to look and to think, to process new information and produce with it in whatever context occurs. And what is produced is much more practical than the ability to recite information; it is conversation, play, invention, business, art, architecture, medicine, and so much more.
Without grades, without subjects, without tests or scores, there is no need for carefully controlled classrooms. Discipline becomes about character rather than classroom management. The world expands outside of four walls as far as feet and imagination can carry us, and every experience is food for the mind. There are no divisions. There are no limits.
This morning I found myself reflecting on my husband’s and my history. When I was a teenager my family attended an annual lecture series at the small college he attended. The students were responsible for a lot of logistics as part of their education, so we would have run into each other multiple times over the course of those weeks. He was 18-20, I was 14-16; we weren’t on each other’s radar and have no memory of meeting at all during that time. Ten years later, a mutual friend introduced us, and the rest is history.
There have been times I wished we had met earlier, had all that time to spend together. The truth is that if we had met as kids we probably wouldn’t be together now. Those ten years shaped the characteristics that drew us together, characteristics that we did not possess as teenagers. We both went through things: failed relationships, first jobs, successes and failures, and other challenges that helped us discover independently who we were. By the time we found each other’s orbit we both understood what we were looking for and how to recognize it.
It is a lesson I have worked very hard to take to heart. So often we try to rush life, demanding whatever we want in the moment as if the course of our lives depends upon it. We push harder and harder, younger and younger, and look back on our lives with regret and bitterness that our rushed decisions didn’t produce the fruit we wanted. My life would look very different now without those ten years. I would likely have ended up marrying one of those failed relationships I mentioned and it would still have failed, or chasing one of those challenges in a fruitless search for fulfillment. Even if a second opportunity to meet had arisen I would likely have rejected it based on first impressions, never realizing the change time could produce.
There is a right time for the right things to happen in our lives. We have to learn to appreciate the wait. Waiting is not wasted time; it’s growing time. What do you choose to learn from your experiences? What changes are you willing to make after your failures? What do you learn about yourself from relationship challenges, and what characteristics do you learn to pursue? No one knows what they really want until they have experienced all of those aspects of life. Celebrate the wait.
It’s a bad word in our society, a lightning rod that attracts every social argument imaginable. Manual laborers view with contempt those who work with their minds, considering them lazy and out of touch with reality. Those in intellectually focused professions look down on manual laborers, certain that no one with ambition would waste time working with their hands. Both despise those who work in entertainment, considering them lazy, immoral, or both. Then, of course, there are those who receive public aid; whether or not due to true need seems irrelevant, whether they are exalted or despised.
Work as a concept is not that complicated. It is the process by which one contributes to one’s society. Every individual has a contribution to make, a way to work, that is unique to him or herself. That contribution may or may not be one that requires specialized knowledge. It may or may not include clocking in for a boss. It may or may not produce what are considered survival necessities. But it is still a necessary contribution.
Animals spend their lives chasing survival. They have little if any other motivation. They have no capacity for appreciation, for individuality, for true creativity. Only humans have such abilities, and as possessor of them, we are not meant merely to survive. We are meant not only to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves, but to learn, to imagine, to produce beauty and laughter, to touch hearts with language, to challenge each other in image or song.
The Creator declared the laborer worthy of his hire. What makes a farmer more entitled to compensation than a poet? What makes a doctor more entitled to compensation than an electrician? What makes a retail worker more entitled than a football player or actor more entitled than an entrepreneur? Does the poet do less work because it was mostly internal and not easily quantifiable? Does the entrepreneur not deserve the same recognition of talent and dedication to their dreams as the actor?
By the same token, because we are designed with such great potential, our lives should not be reduced to a daily grind. Our work should be drawn from our passions and character, and should encompass everything that is important to us as individuals. If we thought this way, the woman who chooses to balance time with her family as well as set hours performing a task for money would not be criticized. The man who pours all his resources into crafting products for sale and whose wife and children work alongside him would be heralded for his efforts instead of vilified for demanding fair pay for his efforts. The poet who poured her troubled soul into song to relieve another’s pain would never be expected to share her gift without pay. Every work would be understood to be essential, and would be compensated as essential.
From the very beginning of the world, when Adam and Eve tried to deflect responsibility for their rebellion, humans have relied upon blame culture. Anything wrong is always someone or something else’s fault. Children do it to get out of trouble. Adults do it to avoid dealing with problems. Each generation blames whatever is unfamiliar or new for the failings of the next to avoid facing their own flaws.
Blame is easy. “It’s the company’s fault!” “It’s the phone’s fault!” “It’s my parent’s fault!” On and on it can go. I can’t be wrong because someone else did it. I can’t fix it because I didn’t do it. Why doesn’t someone fix the problem already?! You don’t understand my situation, which makes my problems your fault.
Sadly, blame culture creates side effects. Instead of looking for solutions, we begin looking for more problems. Instead of respecting innovation and hard work, we slaver for indifference or stagnation to feed our indignation. Instead of being strong we wallow in victimhood.
We are not and have never been victims of anything but our own selfishness and laziness. We scream about the dangers of and ban all use of technology that allows mass communication so that we never have to teach how to communicate properly. We bang our pitchforks against the doors of those with whom we disagree, ensuring that those doors remain barred, so that we never have to examine anyone’s motives or face disconcerting truths. We excoriate entire groups of people for the debauchery of our society so that we never have to sit down and answer our children’s hard questions. Despite having all the power and responsibility for change, we use it merely to bully others from a position of cowardice.
I refuse to participate in blame culture any longer. I refuse to leave my children vulnerable to victimhood by never teaching them how to rise. I refuse to consign my own or anyone else’s soul to eternal torment by avoiding the hard process of connection and understanding. God took responsibility for our salvation, knowing full well that we would never live up to His perfection, knowing that we would fight and rebel and take the easy way out over and over again. He placed His power in me and I am no victim; I have no one to blame but myself if I waste it, and neither does anyone else.
Jax had always hated Cosmopolis with its plasfalt streets, adamantium tracks, and neon lighting. It was as if the city founders had built their idea of a city on bad sci-fi movies from the 20th century. Probably had, he thought with a grim tug at his sleeves. Back at the end of the 21st century, when the mission to settle Proxima business moon had launched, two generations would have been born and died on the ship carrying them across space. The generation that built their new home would have been raised on memories in an artificial world.
Now, of course, wormhole technology had linked systems much farther than Alpha Centauri into a “small universe.” With little distance and time between Earth and colony, the settlers of the last century or two showed little variance from modern Earth culture. Cosmopolis, however, remained apart, preserving their artificial world in a bubble of self-exaltation.
Jax sighed as he tugged on the sleeves of his bodysuit. It certainly wasn’t designed for comfort, but at least the dull coloring made him hard to spot in the dim street. Venturing out of one’s registered residence during curfew was risky, but his business could not be conducted under the suspicious eyes of Cosmopolitans.
“I see you made it,” a hard voice spoke behind him. “No, don’t turn,” it snapped as he jerked into motion. “You can hear what I have to say just as well with your back turned. If you are caught, or lying, you must have no information with which to give me away.” After a brief pause, the voice rasped even more harshly. “I know how to hack the AI. Cosmopolis will be ours within the month.”
Recently I posted a series of questions on social media. I wanted, and received, feedback revealing how we as a society understand certain concepts that are central to a civilization. Need, work, and identity are necessary in order for a culture to thrive, but perception of what constitutes those things varies widely. When those varying perceptions clash in a battle of wills, a civilization teeters on the brink of collapse. Differences of opinion don’t have to be a death knell, however; if considered carefully without prejudice, they can become a stronger, more stable framework that incorporates every possibility.
As evidenced by many of the answers given, we often get stuck in one pattern of thinking, a pattern that applied to a particular society with particular tools at a particular time. We look back with disdain on past eras, talk with pride about progress, celebrate increased opportunity for prosperity, while at the same time treating everything that led to our current situation with contempt. New ideas, different opportunities, can’t be good ones because our grandparents didn’t have them. New tools must be luxuries because our grandparents didn’t need them. Little consideration is given to how new ideas, new opportunities, and new tools changed the civilization in which we live.
As little as a hundred years ago, the automobile was unaffordable by all but the wealthiest. Roads were narrow and unpaved, traveled by pedestrians or horse-drawn vehicles. Some of the bigger cities might have the convenience of streetcars or elevated trains, and long distance travel relied on the railroads, but even those were recent developments. Communities were smaller and more self-sufficient; schools were smaller, with their primary focus teaching basic literacy skills, as children entered the workforce early to contribute to the family’s support. The children were educated in the factories, the fields, the construction sites, or if they were very lucky, behind the counter of a store. The arts were expensive pursuits that the common citizen could not afford to pursue and that the wealthy, although they enjoyed the entertainment gleaned from artistic production, considered demeaning. The wealthy, focused on increasing their wealth and status, pursued a classical higher education and built careers in business or politics. Information about the world outside one’s immediate community was limited to rumors or newspapers, and arrived slowly if at all. Telephones existed but were expensive and often communal.
Now, a century forward, our nation would be unrecognizable to the people of the past. Not only are automobiles so common that roads, communities, and cities are built around access by car, but the train has been made obsolete by air travel, a possibility barely even imagined at that time. Schools are not only available to the average citizen, but require attendance of every child under a certain age. Not only does every citizen have access to higher education, but lack of a college degree has become a barrier to employment or advancement. Not only are telephones common, but the invention and development of computer technology has turned phones into handheld instant access to information and long distance communication. Improvements in transportation and communication opened up the world beyond the community, allowing the average citizen access to opportunities impossible in small communities. Family businesses can now become large corporations with worldwide customer bases in a relatively short amount of time thanks to the ability to network and market via the internet. Creative pursuits are now not only possible for the average citizen but often extremely profitable, even independent of established circles.
The world has changed, and with it the definitions of concepts. Bare subsistence by the definitions of a hundred years ago is now considered a moral standard to be achieved, as if barely avoiding starvation and exposure in a world of plenty makes one virtuous. The opportunity of exercising one’s God created individuality by using one’s God-given abilities to support oneself has expanded the definition of work and jobs, yet we cling to the outdated insistence that only doing manual labor in the employment of another is “real work.” Intellectual pursuits, although glorified in the form of insistence on college attendance, are still despised as leaching off of the “real workers” of the world. Those same opportunities only exist using the great connective powers of modern technology, making technology a necessity in our culture, yet we call it a luxury and religiously advocate to prevent the pursuit of our God-created identities.
A hundred years ago these opportunities did not exist. People didn’t have a choice. The average able-bodied citizen was forced to ignore and repress individuality in order to survive. Life was hard and the people who endured it often equally so. Those who possessed physical or mental disabilities couldn’t conceive of even the limited opportunities available to the able-bodied and able-minded. Most were institutionalized, tortured with experimental treatments for conditions that no one understood, and often died young. Some few with undeniable gifts in the arts found patrons who allowed them a semblance of a normal life, but even they were often ostracized by society for “scandalous” behavior and ended up self-destructing. Their lives held no value to other humans because as far as society was concerned they could not contribute a fair share.
In our age of information, understanding, and opportunity, attitudes haven’t changed. Oh, we talk a good game, but we still insist that everyone meet the same standards, perform the same work in the same way, rise to the same challenges, produce the same outcomes. In an age where individuality is so obvious and tools are so readily available, we despise differences and try to force uniformity. In an age of plenty, we try to force poverty. In an age of information, we try to force ignorance. In an age of opportunity, we try to force disadvantage.
In this incredible time and place, we have the greatest of opportunities. We can choose to value every life, every contribution, every ability, every effort, and every challenge without prejudice. We can support the intellectual and the manual laborer with equal respect to the different types of effort required. We can accept the vast amount of time and skill required to produce an artistic endeavor and take time to enjoy the result with respect that the artist cared to bring joy into our lives in the form of entertainment. We can provide relief for our loved ones who suffer from visible or invisible differences in ability, and ensure them the opportunity to contribute in their own equally valuable way. We can recognize that need is as individual as individuals, and support each other without disdain or dismissal. We can break away from conformity made unnecessary by opportunity, and choose to celebrate the designed individuality of every member of God’s creation.
The Word Worker 
