They Will Also Be Watching

I have worked two and three jobs at a time for most of my marriage. Security, driving, construction. Nobody on any of those crews ever gave me a speech about what they expected. They just watched.

That is what is waiting for your son. Someday he'll be the youngest guy on a crew of grown men, and the men will be nice enough to him. By the first coffee break, they also decide whether he is coming back.

They decide it by small things. Whether he is standing there when the truck doors open. Whether he finds somebody and says, “Done, what’s next,” or stands around waiting to be found. Whether the phone is in his hand on the clock. A man watching a boy scroll on his dime says nothing about it. He just stops calling, and the kid goes home and tells his mother the work dried up.

Then there is the ribbing. Grown men test a new kid. He laughs once and keeps working, and he is in. He gets rattled, or gets even, and he is done.

And there is the correction, probably in front of everybody. “He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul: but he that heareth reproof getteth understanding.” (Proverbs 15:32) The boy who says “got it” and does it their way learns the trade. The boy who argues learns to drive home early.

“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right.” (Proverbs 20:11)

Known by his doings. Not by his potential, not by his personality, not by what his mother says about him.

Teach it now, while the crew is still you and a Saturday project in the garage. He learns to show up, ask what is next, leave the phone in the house, and take a correction without a face. He learns it from his father at twelve, or from a foreman at seventeen who will not bother to teach it.

“It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.” (Lamentations 3:27)