Builders

Leaders build things. I am embarrassed to say that I have really never built anything until I moved here and we are building a barn, fences and fireplaces and boy it's fun. Watching my daughter and her friend Ella work on the barn today made me think of a poem I heard as a child. Our world needs more builders and fewer wreckers.

“I watched them tearing a building down,

A gang of men in a busy town.

With a ho-heave-ho and a lusty yell,

They swung a beam, and the side wall fell.

I asked the foreman: "Are these skilled--

And the men you'd hire if you had to build?

"He gave me a laugh and said: "No, indeed!

Just common labor is all I need.

I can wreck in a day or two

What builders have taken a year to do."

And I thought to myself as I went my way,

Which of these roles have I tried to play?

Am I a builder who works with care

Measuring life by a rule and square?

Am I shaping my deeds to a well made Plan,

Patiently doing the best I can?

Or am I a wrecker, who walks the town

Content with the labor of tearing down?”― Edgar A. Guest