Here are the two thing you need to know before I tell my story …

1. Yesterday Tina and I spent all day in the blazing heat pruning our garden. We got tired and sore. We got scratched up. And we did a lot of sweating.

2. This morning at 5:30 by the fire pit I was sipping my coffee and wading through news articles on my phone. You can imagine all the joyous headlines I encountered.

• School massacre • War in Ukraine • Gas prices • Wildfires • Jan 6th Commission • Recession • Infections • Elections • Abortions • Inflation

Did I hit all the “tions”? Ok, anyway, now to the point … In perusing real news articles I somehow took a wrong turn and ended up (don’t ask me how) on Buzz Feed—the place with all the useless click-bait embedded lists like "14 Reasons why Your Cat Secretly Hates You,” and “20 Famous People Who Don’t Know How To Drive.” You know, hard hitting journalism at its best. So I was about to click my way out of there when, damnit, one list caught my eye. It was entitled, “24 Jobs That Are Often Glamorized But Suck In Reality.” So, ok, I took the bait. I won’t bore you with the entire list but its tour of secretly sucky jobs included teachers, doctors, chefs, archeologists, ballet dancers, anyone in the film industry other than actors, musicians, architects, marine biologists, event planners, and veterinarians, to name but a few. And it went on to describe why doing any of these jobs can be difficult, as if it were some kind of big investigative discovery. Really? Work can be difficult? I’m shocked! Why didn’t anyone tell me that before now?!

So here’s the point. As I read the descriptions of why each of these professions suck I found myself conceding that, yes, I suppose all of those things can be true. But as to the article’s premise that difficulty makes things suck? I found I was invalidating each claim with four simple words. This job sucks … unless you love it.

And that brought me back to the news, and gardening on a hot day, and life in general.

Gardening on a hot day is difficult and messy and exhausting and it can suck … unless you love it. Which we do. In the real world, any job has plenty of difficulty and mess and exhaustion in it, which means any job can suck … unless you love it. Life is full of bad news and tragedy and difficulty and mess and it can all be incredibly exhausting and might lead you to think life sucks … unless you love it. Not love the mess, but love life itself. Difficulty is of no consequence in the presence of passion.

So I put this to you … I know you’re old enough to know how hard life is. But are you young enough and passionate enough to notice how wondrous life is? Life is difficult and messy and exhausting, but that doesn’t matter if you love it. So maybe today, just for a while, look past all the difficulties and all the mess and all the exhausting bad news, and instead challenge yourself to get passionate about something again. Passionate enough to put up with all the rest, because of how much you love it. Then, take that passion out into this difficult and exhausting world, and go build yourself a beautiful life.