Last night at L!VE I had a friend of ours, Kaine Leonard owner of Rocky Mountain Masonry, come and speak to everyone about masonry and lessons he has learned along the way. He started by telling everyone how in college he was an extreme gravity biker, adrenaline was his rush. He would take his 40lbs bike up to the top of mountains, often using ski lifts to get there, then fly down the mountain at top speeds. What a ride. He then graduated from Western with a geology degree and discovered that working in a cubical was not going to work for him. Masonry was calling him, but his first lesson was Pride. He had a college degree, an extreme biker and now was reduced to a grunt laborer. With this new role he had to force himself to plow through taking each moment by moment task and completing it with integrity as the low man on the totem poll. And this is how his masonry life began. With pride being toppled from the beginning.
A quick summery of other life lessons:
*Take each step moment by moment. You cannot rush through and complete your job. It takes time to do it right.
*Put your blinders on. You cannot look at the enormous job set before you. You start with the rock in hand. Focus on the small task and you will soon look around to discover that you have accomplished more than you realized.
*Rock doesn't care. If you mess up or break a rock, don't loose your cool. It won't help anything, the rock doesn't care that you did it wrong.
*Perfect product/perfect material. You don't have to have lots of tools and a huge supply of rock, what you have is sufficient.
*Work on your knees.... enough said
*Work smarter, not harder. If you go at the rocks before you with all of your strength the entire working day, you will burn out fast. It is about being smart with what you have now.
*Patience- go with the flow. This is not a race to see who can make it down the mountain first. It is about a slow and steady adaptability.
*Sometimes when you do everything right, it still seems not to work. You can't give up. It is about a new day, same job.
*You can be so proud of a job you have done. You think you did it without error, but when you return to that job after learning more, you discover that as you look at your past job, you didn't know as much as you thought you did. You look at the job you did and discover things with a new eye.
*Work from the outside in. You cannot start a task of smoothing a rock from where you want to end. You have to start from the outside, chipping away small pieces to finally achieve the rock you desired from the beginning. You cannot see it and start there. You see it, then work your way in.
So many life lessons in just a short amount of time. As we travel through this life, doing the slow and steady work before us God is teaching us. He is showing us who we really are and teaching us to work better. The most important stone is the cornerstone. This one is vital for any building. "The stone the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone." We get so used to the rush of life. We see the race and want to be the first to cross the finish line. When we learn from our Lord, we see that it is not about fast, but efficient. You cannot rush through. You cannot focus on where you want to end, but you need to have miopia, nearsightedness. Today, work slowly and diligently. Do not get overwhelmed with the big construction sight, but pick up you rock and start chipping away piece by piece. Allow Christ to be your cornerstone and you will have a secure and well built building. Another little note that Kaine added, we laugh a lot on the job. When you are entrenched in the work set before you, you laugh. Enjoy this ride....
