Is This Worth It?

My parents both worked in town so my sister and I were often left at home with a list of chores and a lot of free time. I spent a lot of days exploring the woods. Looking for arrowheads, climbing trees, building forts out of old fallen trees.

Then one day, while walking along the lake shore, a glimmer in a rock wall caught my eye. I looked closer and saw a long vein in the rock.

Diamonds.

I knew Arkansas was called the diamond state, and that they were still found in parts of it, but I never expected this. We were rich. I thought if I could get them out, mom and dad wouldn't have to work anymore. We could travel the world.

So I set out to mine them. I stole several of my dad's hammers, some chisels, and a five-gallon bucket. Then headed back down to the rock wall and started mining away.

For probably three weeks I kept at it, telling no one, hiding my tools if fishermen came within sight. I filled the entire bucket. Some stones were milky white, others clear as water and bright in the sun. I was meticulous. Gimli and the Dwarves of Erebor would have marveled at this tiny human and wondered if he had dwarf blood.

When I'd extracted everything I could, I hauled the bucket up the hill and waited for dad to get home. Eager to share the good news.

Dad finally arrived, and I’ll never forget his reaction.

"Oh cool! Quartz crystal."

Wait. I thought these were diamonds.

"No, this is quartz. Sometimes big ones can sell for a few hundred dollars at rock shops. Mostly they use it to make glass."

So I've done all this for a bucket full of glass?

Is this worth it?

I've been thinking about that story a lot lately, because I'm in a season of building and hard work—husband, parent of four sons, and in the midst of that chaos, starting a ghostwriting and newsletter consulting business.

Deep down, part of me wonders. What if everything I'm working so hard to accomplish amounts to a bucket of glass?

Maybe you've felt something like that too. The startup you took a risk to build that's going slower than expected. The nonprofit whose mission is clear but fundraising keeps you worn out. The work of parenting, where you're trying to break generational patterns and still wonder if it will ever feel like enough. If you’re a person of faith, maybe there’s even an unspoken fear that you’ll get to the end of all this, present yourself before the God of the universe hoping for a “Well done, good and faithful servant,” only to hear “That’s it?”

I think anyone doing any kind of hard work has felt something like this, because it strikes at the heart of one of life’s core questions:

Is this worth it?

Looking back, I see two angles in that bucket of glass story I couldn't see at twelve. Two lenses that have helped me sit with that question more honestly.

The Lens of Reasonable Judgement

In my story, my dad served as what I'd call the lens of reasonable judgement. He evaluated my bucket and determined its true value. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t harsh. He didn't scold me for taking his tools, didn't laugh in my face. He just told the truth. He brought judgement without being judgmental.

Reasonable judgement forces a quantitative assessment. Clear eyes on what you're actually building.

The nonprofit working against human trafficking, what are the numbers? There are over 27 million people enslaved today. You'll play a role, but you can't save them all. The rapid changing tech of AI may make your SAAS startup irrelevant. Parents, even if you do everything right, you can't control the trajectory of your kid once they leave home. I'm going to die one day. And as bad as I want to be remembered forever, I can barely name my great-great-grandparents. Why should mine remember me?

These sound harsh, I know. But that's exactly what a quantitative assessment does when it works right. It moves us from delusion to wisdom. Not brutally. Just honest, the way my dad did it.

We need people in our lives who can open our eyes to the facts. People who can look in our bucket and tell us what’s actually in it. Not to discourage us, but to develop us.

However, if we only view life through this lens of reasonable judgement, we can grow jaded, even nihilistic–”nothing matters, it's all been done before, everything is broken glass!”

But that’s not the full picture. We need a second set of lenses.

The Lens of Unreasonable Joy

A few years ago, my parents split up and moved away from that house by the lake. It was the end of an era and sad to lose a sense of home.

But one day, my mom shows up at my house to help my wife with the kids while I went to work, and with her she has this big jar. Inside the jar are all sorts of knickknacks, small toys, rocks, playing cards, odds and ends. Things she’d found in my pockets as a kid while doing laundry.

At first, I'm thinking, “Mom, why’d you collect my trash all those years?” It was junk.

But not to her.

To this completely unreasonable woman, these were little treasures. While doing the mundane chore of cleaning my dirty laundry, she'd empty my pockets and occasionally find some little trinket. Some little window into my childhood. Some evidence of what mattered to me enough to pick up off the ground and stick it in my pocket. It didn't matter that I'd forget about it hours later. For a moment, it was valuable to me.

Therefore it was valuable to my mom.

And wouldn’t you know it, inside the jar were a few pieces of quartz crystal.

This is what I'd call the lens of unreasonable joy. Where reasonable judgement runs a quantitative assessment—numbers, outcomes, measurable results—unreasonable joy runs a qualitative one. It asks different questions. Not 'what did it produce?' or 'what's it worth on the market?' but 'what is it worth to the people impacted?'

Seeing work through this lens is what allows you to show up with passion and tenacity. To bring your heart into what you're doing.

I get to talk with a lot of founders in my work, and they typically have a little of this in them too. It sounds like:

“I was made to do this.”
“We’re breaking the power of legacy media companies.”
“If someone offered me $10M for this company right now, I wouldn’t take it.”

My dad's assessment was right. It was quartz. That was disappointing. But my mom's jar is what moved me from disappointment into the wonder of what it actually meant. The real value of our work often doesn't show up for years.

Recently for me, another “jar” moment looked like an unexpected text from an old student from my youth ministry days. One that a lot of people might have written off, but I'd spent time with because I could just see something in him. He's now a pastor himself, impacting hundreds of families. I had no idea.

Clarity Comes From Both

When it comes to our work, I think we need to practice wearing both lenses: reasonable judgement and unreasonable joy.

There may be a day when you wake up and realize the thing you've been working on is glass in a bucket. And the reasonable thing to do is pivot. Find a new mine. At the same time, there may be days when you get a glimpse of the intrinsic value of all you've been working for and how it carries worth that goes unreasonably beyond anything you could calculate.

When we practice that kind of reflection, I think we develop a sort of bifocaled vision: what we’re working to build may be as commonplace as crystals, and yet we may be dealing with treasure worth more than we can imagine.

In his parable about the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), Jesus tells a story about a Master who returns to find two of his three servants had faithfully taken risks to work and grow the resources he left them to steward. To both the one with 5 talents and the one with only 2, he said, “You’ve been faithful with a little.”

So let's be reasonable. In the grand scheme of things, whether we’re building a small side gig or a billion dollar enterprise, it’s all just “a little” to God.

But if we’re faithful? “You’ll be entrusted with much.”

And what do you think “much” looks like to the God who owns all there is?

Maybe good work leads to more good work which leads to more. And more importantly, it leads to joy. The Master invited the faithful, “Come. Enter your Master’s joy.” Unreasonable joy.

So if we’re faithful with what’s in front of us, big or small, it appears the answer is:
"It's worth it."