The Paper Route

Like many other kids growing up in the late 1970s, my first “real job” was delivering newspapers.  I’d rush home from school each afternoon, eager to set off on a new adventure.  In nice weather, I’d load up my rickety old Schwinn, complete with a banana seat and a bag of papers slung heavily over the handlebars.  In the winter, I’d bundle up like a kid from “A Christmas Story” and trek through the arctic landscape of my neighborhood. 

While Hollywood usually portrays paperboys as carefree youngsters tossing papers willy-nilly from their bikes, the job carried a surprising amount of responsibility for a 10-year-old kid.  I was slated with delivering 45 newspapers a day, 6 days a week, all year long.  Papers were not to be thrown aimlessly on front lawns, but rather placed neatly on each individual doorstep.  Through heat, sun, wind, rain, sleet and snow... no paid sick days, no personal days, no vacation weeks.   

For all this responsibility, my pay was a whopping 65 cents a day!  That didn’t bother me though.  I wasn’t in it for the money.  Honestly, I don’t even know what I was in it for.  I was 10.  I just kind of… did it.  But without realizing it, I was learning the fulfillment of doing good work and completing a job well done.

These days there’s a tendency to shy away from honest hard work.  Our culture widely views work as punishment.  People will do just about anything to get out of work.  Work is despised.  Work is ridiculed.  Relaxation reigns.  Social media revolves around who’s supposedly having the most fun, as opposed to what they’re accomplishing. 

As Christians, our perspective should be different. 

The entire first chapter of the Bible talks about work.  God was working.  Genesis 2:2 says, “On the seventh day God had finished His work of creation, so He rested from all His work.”  Work wasn’t a necessary evil for Him.  It was the sheer joy of producing something that was “very good.”  God created Adam and Eve in His own image, and being a worker was part of that image.  In John 5:17 Jesus said, “My Father is always working, and so am I.”

The work we do in this world reflects God and fulfills a calling from Him.  Right from the beginning, God created a garden for Adam – not for recreation, but to cultivate and care for (Genesis 2:15).  In the same way, we’re not here to simply observe God’s handiwork, but to participate in it… to do our part for the purpose He created us.

Are we reflecting the image of God in our attitude towards work?  

- Ron Reid