Just a thing.

When we were in Sacramento, we wanted to do some remodeling on our house. We had a bathroom that was reminiscent of a dark, dirty and narrow facility on a dark, dirty and narrow fishing boat that had been out to sea for three days too long. We also wanted to put a deck and a sliding glass door off of our back family room and close up a spot where the old door was.

Since we didn't have the skills for all this and since I had scaled back to part time at the Church and took a full time position as director of marketing for an assisted living facility, we decided to get some out side help. One of the guys at our Church was a skilled contractor who was in between jobs and stuck in the middle of some union dispute or some such thing, so we brought him over to have a look.

He was a go for all our plans and was soon sawing, cutting, tearing, building and overall doing a nice job. When people at our church heard he was working on our place, we did hear a bit of grumbling. "Must be nice." and "We never could get him to come and do stuff at our place." and"Maybe if I was the Pastor, he would come work on my house too."

I am not sure if they did, but I think I figured out why he came and worked on our place and never seemed to have the time to get to theirs. The difference was, we paid him a fair and generous rate for the work he did. I think a few of the others were hoping he could come help them in his spare time. I am sure he would have liked to, but, at the time, he was trying to find extra work to keep his family fed and in their house.

Helping out others at no charge is a good thing, but it is nice to be able to pay the bills. I guess that is one reason why paying someone for the work they do is an important part of life.