What makes me tick?

I’m posting this for all of you who want to know “what makes me tick,” so to speak.  I’m built to produce, create wealth and use it, invest it, or give it away to create things of good and lasting value and make the most of life.  I am a spring where blessing through God can flow. Just don’t put a pump on it and force out than naturally flows.  I think beyond today and years into the future. While we are here on this earth for a very short period of time, if I can discern what God wants me to do and not lean on my own understanding, then my creativity, hard work, my mind, and the resources I’ve been blessed with, I hope to make a difference in the world for the better.

That doesn’t make me a “do-gooder” but someone who believes we should all get a chance at success.  I have very little patience for those who demand my hard-fought gains for some philanthropic cause that is the desire of others to throw at some bottomless pit that has no planned benefit to seed more good. Plus, since my labors created it, I would like to be asked, not bullied or guilt-tripped, to give those hard-fought gains. Let me and God make that decision.  Just because my labors created honestly earned wealth doesn’t mean it’s automatically allocated to remember “the needy” just because someone has less. There may be a reason for that, including the possibility that the drive to EARN it was not there for the NEEDY person or cause. Or the cause or circumstances demand that someone step up. 

The fact of the matter is as Jesus himself said, “there will always be poor among you” we will always have more need than supply in this fallen world.  We are all created equal in God’s eyes but not guaranteed outcomes of our actions.  Whether or not you don’t have all the mentality to split atoms or physical differences, each of us, barring any manmade tyranny, have under God equal chances to live life to the fullest and be welcomed into heaven someday as good and faithful servants and find treasures there that we cannot comprehend.

Making money is inherently a Godly thing. It’s a product by which we measure our labors’ value and allows us to trade and conduct commerce. It’s just a thing that only fools’ worship in place of God.  Remember, He owns everything; we are stewards of it all. (1 Chronicles 29:10-18).  Like the parable of the servants granted their masters money to invest and grow, we can either hoard it, spend it foolishly or be wise, discerning, work hard, grow it, and not consume it beyond a point where it becomes your God. (Matthew 25:14-30). 

Communism sounds like a Christian way of life. Work hard and give back to each according to their need, just like the early disciples did, right? NOT. They were working on a huge project called The Church, and they needed working capital and long-term investment and a sustainable wage to see it through. Money, or its equivalent, was used (borrowed from God through the labors of man) to finance the spreading of the Gospel. But through prayer and hard work, not guilt-tripping the sources of that capital, and the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit did it all. Even the Apostle Paul (who was a tentmaker by trade) moonlighted his trade to pay his way to finance his travels and ministry. And when he got churches going, he asked for help, and they gave him in effect compensation for services rendered. No one forced Paul to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was in love with the Gospel and OF HIS OWN FREE WILL, relying upon God’s given wisdom.  Paul chose this for himself; not any man chose for him or goaded him into that mission.

For I am a Christian (follower of Jesus), God has given me certain gifts and limited talents.  Whatever missteps or limitations I have, working hard and with discernment has been my creed.  This, in large part, came from how I was raised. I was raised on a dairy farm. It was hard and honest work. My dad, in addition to being a hard worker, was innovative. He bought the first New Holland hay bailer in southern Wisconsin with money gleaned out of the farm.  He would leave the farm after milking the cows, hop on his tractor with bailer in tow and bail all night on other farms and get home just in time to milk in the morning (and, of course, in between times bail our hay. He would go to Illinois in the wintertime with our old International Cabover flatbed hauling load after a load of bailing twine that he bought cheap out of season and stored it on the top floor of the hog house to be used in his all-nighter bailing operation.

We had a welder on the farm, and all us kids learned how to weld (except me because only 8-9 years old at that time). I was raking hay with a tractor and mechanical rake to make rows of hay ahead of the bailer and haul wagon loads of hay to the barns. We’d make contraptions out of metal we’d fabricate out of anything we could find and weld chutes and parts for the machines. If it broke, weld it. We devised a green feed wagon that was filled with fresh alfalfa or fresh chopped corn that would be pulled to the cow pasture; gravity would feed the cows with no power, unattended until empty. We built an automatic feed lot feeder that, using an Archimedes screw, that would pull the corn silage out of the silo to carry the feed out to a long trough for the cows and pigs to feed at, all with the push of an electric switch. As a family of five, we made a little 160-acre farm produce enough to feed us, a surplus to sell and generously tithe to our church, and give away surplus to some of the other farmers who were a little short.  My dad would quietly go out at night and bale hay in the next farm over while he was having a hard time.  He would work in the farmer’s backfield, and the next morning, drive down the road by the field and see the amazement on the farmer’s face looking at a field full of bailed hay ready to be put in the barn and drive on by and smile to himself.  He enjoyed making a good deed turn into a prank by the way he didn’t charge the farmer.

Hard work innovation and free enterprise was the engine of our success. My dad wasn’t a “pray in public” kind of guy, but I know he had his way of relating. Mom was more open with her spirituality and kept the farm running on time, feeding us all and taking care of us kids. Dad, in general, while a fun-loving dad, hardly ever handed out compliments. You were expected to do your job anything beyond that was accepted without fanfare, and anything short of that was met with rebuke. Through all of that, he was a remarkable man who had a keen sense of timing, whether its business or when to plant and harvest. I loved and respected my dad, and my mom was the nurturer.  Their love for each other is rarely seen today. We finally moved to Florida, where my dad got into the sand business (selling sand in Florida? But my dad did it).

I lost my dad to a heart attack when he was 56, and I was 26 and thrust into our little company’s helm.  My brother, sister, and mom built the company 10-fold. We inherited our dad’s dedication to hard work and innovation, building the company into the only Florida Department of Transportation certified industrial sand mine on Florida’s east coast. The sand deposit was marginal for quality, but we built our high-powered dredge that pushed sand ½ to the sand classifying plant. We built an innovative device called an attrition mill, which uses counter-rotation neoprene propellers to scrub the sand before entering an Archimedes screw with an electric load monitor to regulate another Archimedes screw that added a coarse additive to bring the product into spec.  To test it, we rigged it up to an old Mack dump-truck transmission and rear end to get a right angle drive that drove with an 8-71 Detroit diesel later converted to a 200hpelectric motor once we saw it was going to work. We could use the transmission to shift gears to set the speed right to match material and slurry input.  Now that I have glazed over most of my female readers’ eyes, this section is more toward guy stuff lol.

We also piloted the trial testing of a new invention called the CH sizer that revolutionized how sand is sized (sizing something as small as a grain of sand is essential for concrete road and building construction). We built our radial stacking “cyclone” (which uses the same principle behind a tornado only using water) to capture the very fine sand eliminating the use of large and environmentally unfriendly settling ponds. We’d use this for filler material to make asphalt.  

So why did I drag your reading mind through all this?  Because this is mostly who I am—an extremely flawed but innovative production-driven guy.  I’m a sort of farmer, sort of a musician, and a pretty damn good accountant (old school).  While I have other sides to me, as you’ll see if you allow yourself to be tormented by my prose, but this is what makes me tick in my life’s work. By the way, who is John Galt? If you know the answer to that, then you know this side of me.