What does that have to do with you?

I have mentioned before that I am a Navy veteran. During one period on my first ship, my division officer became concerned about morale and productivity, and asked us for suggestions for incentives. One of the other guys suggested extra liberty and more concrete expectations. Prior to that time, the bulk of our work assignments for a given week were given out on Monday, but then on Tuesday or Wednesday, frequently new tasks were assigned, and then the things that were assigned on Monday ended up getting pushed back to Friday. If we could know, on Monday, what needed to get done that week, we could budget our time accordingly, and if we could leave when the work was done, that would provide incentive to get the work done. The division officer thought that was a good idea, gave us the go ahead. To his credit, he actually got very good at side-stepping those annoying little priorities that normally seemed to pop up in the middle of the week, and we were able to sit down on Monday morning, and portion out the work load in quarters: One quarter to be done on Monday, one quarter on Tuesday, etc., with Friday being a catch-up day, if necessary. The idea being, when we got our work done for Monday, we could leave, or, if 4:00 PM rolled around and we weren't done yet, we left anyway (just like everybody else) and we pushed that back to Tuesday, and whatever was left on Friday we took care of then. Of course, we understood that we were going to be getting underway soon, and once we left the pier, that wasn't going to work. It actually worked very well, for a while, our morale was better, and we got more work done, which improved the division officer's morale. But (and you knew there had to be a 'but' in there somewhere), the First Lieutenant complained about it. Allow me to explain who the First Lieutenant is on a ship. On board ship, one of the most important groups of people is known as 'deck' (deck also happens to be one of those groups of people that nobody thinks of as important unless they are not doing their collective job) . Deck is responsible for the preservation of the ship. On some ships, deck is a department; on my ship, deck was smaller than that, so deck was a division. If deck is a department, then the First Lieutenant is the deck department head; if deck is a division, then he (or she) is the division officer. Now deck is spread out all over the skin of the ship. There is always some part of the ship where the paint has been damaged, and the salt from the sea can get in a start corroding the steel of the ship. If deck slips up, the ship can rust right out from under you. The paint can protect the steel, but, it also can hide the rust. You understand now why I say these guys are important. They are also in a position that they know who comes aboard, and who leaves the ship. The First Lieutenant's complaint was that it was demoralizing to the guys in deck to watch my division leave at 10:00 AM every day. So, our incentives went away, and life in my division went back to normal. To some extent, I can see deck's point: We are all on the same ship, we are getting paid by the same office, why is it that one guy works only a few hours a day compared to some other guy? At the same time, different jobs have different work requirements; if I can do my job in three hours, and it takes you all day to do yours, what does my work hours have to do with you? It's not like either change affected deck's workload or work hours...

In Matthew chapter 20, Jesus taught a parable about a man who owned a vineyard, and needed workers. He knew a spot in the marketplace where men would go if they were looking for work (sort of like today's temp services), and so he went there, and hired some workers for the day. He went back several times later, and hired more men each time. When he went to pay these men, he started with the men who had only come to the vineyard in the late afternoon. The men who were hired early in the morning complained that even the men who were hired in late afternoon (and had avoided working when the day was hottest) got paid the same thing. It didn't seem right to them, but they weren't hired on an hourly scale. Here we aren't talking about different jobs (they all did the same job), just different requirements. Now the man who owned the vineyard felt completely justified in that, it is my vineyard, you come and work for me at the wage we agreed on this morning, or you don't work; don't worry about what agreement I have with any other of my workers, that's none of your business. Of course, Jesus is talking about different people that accept Jesus at different times, or at different times in their lives. You get the same reward (Heaven) whether you accept the Lord as a teenager or on your deathbed. Keep in mind, though, you may not get the opportunity for a deathbed repentance (I saw a bumper sticker once, referring to this parable, that said, "Many people who plan on accepting the Lord in the eleventh hour die at 10:30"). You don't know what the next moment will bring. I don't mean to sound morbid, but a drunk driver could end you mortal existence tonight; if you haven't accepted Jesus as Lord of your life, you should do so now (of course, if you don't think you need to, then going through the motions isn't going to help you any).

Pardon the interruption, but let me get back on the subject at hand: When Peter asked Jesus about what would happen to John, Jesus replied, in John 21:22, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me." Of course, if you read on, John points out that Jesus didn't say that John would live to see the return of Christ, only that if he did, that had nothing to do with Peter.

The point is, don't worry about what God has for someone else. Do what God had for you to do. It may not even seem important, but do it. Realistically, you can't possibly see everything that someone else is going through or has gone through. It's kind of funny, really, oftentimes we feel like nobody else knows or understands what we're going through, but we don't stop to consider that we don't know what other people are going through... But God knows.