Fun and Hard Work?

How often would you say that fun and hard work go well together? We typically picture hard work as something laborious and sweat inducing and probably to be avoided. Visions of shoveling a foot of snow off driveways are soon upon us and for most of us create a sense of dread. That kind of hard work just makes us want to stay in bed.

But is it possible that there is a kind of hard work in this life that might couple nicely with having some fun along the way? I believe so.  I experienced it this past July as I was in Minneapolis with the youth from my congregation.  We were up there for a national youth gathering. One of the elements the gathering offers as part of its program is to participate in a servant event.  They send groups out all over the community to clean up yards, help in nursing centers, and other great service activities.  Our group was sent to an organization called Feed My Starving Children. This is an organization which creates packaged meals and sends them all over the world to help feed starving children. Our servant event was to join them for one of their packing days and spend two hours helping to pack meals. Hard work? Yes. We gathered around stations and were each given a job to do as part of packing the meals. Some of us were measuring out ingredients, others were weighing the packages as made, others were stacking the finished products and putting them in the boxes. We worked and worked and worked and didn’t stop for those two hours. It went by like it was 20 minutes. Amazingly we enjoyed every minute of it.  This was the kind of work that often most people would get paid for and do as their regular job, and yet here we were volunteering and absolutely loving it. Fun and hard work together.