Wisdom Nugget :
Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their
sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.
- Sam Ewing
When I was a boy, I felt it was both a duty and a privilege to help my
widowed mother make ends meet by finding employment in vacation time, on
Saturdays and other times when I did not have to be in school. For
quite a while I worked for a Scottish shoemaker, or "cobbler," as he
preferred to be called, an Orkney man, named Dan Mackay. He was
forthright and his little shop was a real testimony in the neighborhood. The walls were literally covered with Bible texts
and pictures, generally taken from old-fashioned Scripture Sheet
Almanacs, so that look where one would, he found the Word of God staring
him in the face.
On the little counter in front of the bench on which the owner of the
shop sat, was a Bible, generally open, and a pile of gospel tracts. No
package went out of that shop without a printed message wrapped inside.
And whenever opportunity offered, the customers were spoken to kindly
and tactfully about the importance of Faith and the
blessedness of knowing that the soul was saved.
Many came back to ask for more literature or to inquire more
particularly as to how they might find peace with God, frequently right in the shoe
shop.
It was my chief responsibility to pound leather for shoe soles. A piece
of cowhide would be cut to suite, then soaked in water. I had a flat
piece of iron over my knees and, with a flat-headed hammer, I pounded
these soles until they were hard and dry. It seemed an endless operation
to me, and I wearied of it many times.
What made my task worse was the fact that, a block away, there was
another shop that I passed going and coming to or from my home, and in
it sat a jolly, godless cobbler who gathered the boys of the
neighborhood about him and regaled them with lewd tales that made him
dreaded by respectable parents as a menace to the community. Yet,
somehow, he seemed to thrive and that perhaps to a greater extent than
my employer, Mackay. As I looked in his window, I often noticed that he
never pounded the soles at all, but took them from the water, nailed
them on, damp as they were, and with the water splashing from them as he
drove each nail in.
One day I ventured inside, something I had been warned never to do.
Timidly, I said, "I notice you put the soles on while still wet. Are
they just as good as if they were pounded?" He gave me a wicked leer as
he answered, "They come back all the quicker this way, my boy!"
"Feeling I had learned something, I related the instance to my boss and
suggested that I was perhaps wasting time in drying out the leather so
carefully. Mr. Mackay stopped his work and opened his Bible to the
passage that reads, "Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of god."
"Harry," he said, "I do not cobble shoes just for the four bits and six
bits (50c or 75c) that I get from my customers. I am doing this for the
glory of God. I expect to see every shoe I have ever repaired in a big
pile at the judgment seat of Christ, and I do not want the Lord to say
to me in that day, 'Dan, this was a poor job. You did not do your best
here.' I want Him to be able to say, 'Well done, good and faithful
servant.'"
Then he went on to explain that just as some men are called to preach,
so he was called to fix shoes, and that only as he did this well would
his testimony count for God. It was a lesson I have never been able to
forget. Often when I have been tempted to carelessness, and to slipshod
effort, I have thought of dear, devoted Dan Mackay, and it has stirred
me up to seek to do all as for Him who died to redeem me.
