Clean Chapel, Learn Gospel

I remember, with deep gratitude, my father teaching me how to work when I was young. Dad was a property manager. As I entered my early teenage years, he provided me with ample opportunity for employment. I mowed lawns, painted apartments, shampooed carpets, and so forth. When dad would come to inspect the work, he would often demonstrate how I should be achieving twice the results in half the time. Dad loves to work.

Now I’m a father and I want to teach my kids to work. My opportunities are limited. The nature of my housing assignments with the US government is such that I cannot pursue any do-it-yourself projects. My employment is primarily in “mind” work. We live in an urban environment that is foreign to how I grew up and work opportunities for my kids do not occur naturally.

Thus, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to clean our chapel every few months. The instruction for members to clean the chapel came from the prophet. So I am honored to participate. I am convinced that one of the reasons for this program was to teach work ethic. Other reasons surely included cost savings for the church and helping members feel a connection to their facilities that, increasingly, are not purchased with their direct contributions as was once the case. Of those reasons, the first, teaching work ethic, is the most valuable to me.

We cleaned the chapel a few weeks ago. Maddie was not excited about it. She did an adequate but not excellent job of cleaning the glass doors. So I explained to her that for the chapel, adequate simply isn’t good enough. It must be excellent. So I helped her do it again. She did not, at first, appreciate my "help." But as we went back and even redid the work of others who had been less careful, she and Caleb both started to feel the spirit of it. Caleb said, “I just feel so good when I can serve the Lord.” And Maddie, while she never said anything, eventually took to cleaning the outside windows, in the humid heat, without complaint and had a clearly improved affect when the project was over.

The gospel is a message of peace and forgiveness. It is also a call to hard work. I am thankful I can teach this principle by cleaning the chapel.