When I grow up

Do you remember when you were a kid? What did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was a little kid, I loved tractors. My mom used to always say that I was her little tractor man. I obviously don't remember exactly what I loved about tractors so much, but I do distinctively remember associating tractors with my grandpa. My mom's dad died when I was just a few weeks old. I definitely don't remember him at all from the few shorts days we had together. However, as I was growing up, I was always compared to him. My mom and her mom used to always say that I was built like him, that my hair was like his, and that he sure would've loved me!

My love for tractors naturally lead me to Bible college. Oh wait...no it didn't! What did I want to be when I grew up? A farmer! Riding on tractors all day and having tons of animals to call my own sounded like a dream job to my little 7-year-old ears. I wanted to be a farmer, what did you want to be?

Certainly our childhood aspirations and dreams are more innocent than our adult aspirations and dreams-less complicated and layered to say the least. Along with their naivety, they seem to be pure dreams unaffected by the world's demands and rules.

I've been noticing a lot lately that my 2-year-old son, Finley, is obsessed with me. This obsession both scares and fascinates me. I am thinking specifically of what fascinates me about his obsession while I write this blog.


Whether I'm a blue-collar cable tech moving large orange cones in front and back of my van or I'm a blue-collar landscaping worker at a wedding business raking mulch and shoveling dirt, Finley wants to be just like me. He respects me regardless of how I'm treated in my job, he looks up to me regardless of how much I look down on myself, and he considers me his hero regardless of the lack of my power to protect him always. Being so young and, for the most part, unaffected by the world, Finley simply wants to do whatever it is that I do.

It's hard, if not impossible, to remember what it was like when we were kids and thought of a job in simplistic terms. Our concerns were not about dignity, social classifications, pay grade, status, dress code, or any other thing that the world teaches us to be consumed by when looking at the quality of one type of job over another. Instead, when we were kids, we only thought about the coolness of the tools of the trade or who we wanted to be like.

I'm in no way a fan of setting the bar low for oneself when dealing with dreams and aspirations; I just wonder if we could all learn a little something something from kids (either the kids in our life or the kid inside of each one of us). Dare all the more to not be consumed by this world's demands and standards of living. Find dignity in the quality of the worker rather than the type of work being done.