@HomewithDean - Homily 7/17

Here are the two thing you need to know before I tell my story …<br /><br />1. Yesterday Tina and I spent all day in the blazing heat pruning our garden. We got tired and sore. We got scratched up. And we did a lot of sweating.<br /><br />2. This morning at 5:30 by the fire pit I was sipping my coffee and wading through news articles on my phone. You can imagine all the joyous headlines I encountered.<br /><br />• School massacre • War in Ukraine • Gas prices • Wildfires • Jan 6th Commission • Recession • Infections • Elections • Abortions • Inflation<br /><br />Did I hit all the “tions”? Ok, anyway, now to the point … In perusing real news articles I somehow took a wrong turn and ended up (don’t ask me how) on Buzz Feed—the place with all the useless click-bait embedded lists like "14 Reasons why Your Cat Secretly Hates You,” and “20 Famous People Who Don’t Know How To Drive.” You know, hard hitting journalism at its best. So I was about to click my way out of there when, damnit, one list caught my eye. It was entitled, “24 Jobs That Are Often Glamorized But Suck In Reality.” So, ok, I took the bait. I won’t bore you with the entire list but its tour of secretly sucky jobs included teachers, doctors, chefs, archeologists, ballet dancers, anyone in the film industry other than actors, musicians, architects, marine biologists, event planners, and veterinarians, to name but a few. And it went on to describe why doing any of these jobs can be difficult, as if it were some kind of big investigative discovery. Really? Work can be difficult? I’m shocked! Why didn’t anyone tell me that before now?!<br /><br />So here’s the point. As I read the descriptions of why each of these professions suck I found myself conceding that, yes, I suppose all of those things can be true. But as to the article’s premise that difficulty makes things suck? I found I was invalidating each claim with four simple words. This job sucks … unless you love it.<br /><br />And that brought me back to the news, and gardening on a hot day, and life i