THE WORST JOB

No. I just thought of the worst job ever. You can ask some of the Southeast Asia Team and Peru ’04 Team members; they’ll back me up on this one.

Junia, member on the Peru team, hooked us up with an opportunity to raise funds for missions by working for a few weeks in an auto parts factory in Indiana. So for 2 or 3 weeks that summer, we’d wake up for mandatory morning prayer, pray till 8am, and then drive for 2 hours all the way to Indiana. There, we had to sift through 18,000 drive shafts to manually look for defective parts. There were crates and crates of oily and greasy auto parts that we had to pick up, take the bubble wrap off of, see if the part had a little nick, put a marking on it if it did, and put the good parts back in the crate. There were no seats, no amenities, no redeeming feature about the job itself except it did help us raise hundreds of dollars for missions fund and we bonded with one another. After each day, our backs were sore and our hands greasy. Mind you, this was summer, so we were all sweating profusely. It was nasty.

But that was an eye-opening experience. There were other factory workers there, and they did this kind of manual and back-breaking labor for a living to feed their family. For 2-3 weeks, we were all complaining about how hard and tedious this job was; but for some people, this is their life. And yet, they never complained and always smiled while they did their job. Talk about a lesson on humility.

But yeah…I believe that experience tops it all.