By Andrew Hawes —Master
Let me start this month’s article with a plea for help. We need brothers from the lodge to step up and volunteer their time to help our candidates learn their ritual and progress through the degrees!
Part of our Masonic journey is to help others. Our brothers in Masonry who need to learn ritual need help doing so. None of us has been able to learn our ritual and progress through the degrees without our fellow brother Masons giving of their time and energy to help us do so.
We need everyone to pay that back, in order for Masonry, in general, and our lodge, in particular, to thrive. Please consider donating an hour of your time each week to meet with a candidate and help them memorize their ritual. You don’t need to be a perfect ritualist to help. You just need to be able to read from the book and help someone else learn what it says.
Speaking of spending an hour a week on something, let's talk more about measuring and allocating our time. We all know that as Masons we should be trying to measure our time and spend it wisely. How many of you feel you are successful at allocating a third of your day, each day, to the service of God and a distressed worthy brother? I know that I, for one, fall particularly short in this regard. I definitely spend my 8 hours a day on my usual vocation – any of us that haven't retired have that one in the bag. I also usually don’t have any issue getting my 8 hours of refreshment and repose in, although it’s often more skewed towards refreshment than repose, given the amount of television I watch and games I play! But what about service to God or a distressed worthy brother? How many of us can say that we spend even one hour a day on that pursuit? Go to church on Sunday? Great, there’s one hour. Per week, not per day. Volunteer at a soup kitchen? There’s another couple of hours… per week. Getting even one hour a day can be a difficult task, and one that can seem insurmountable, especially as someone who has only recently joined Masonry, and is trying to learn how to make it work for them, and them with it.
So we have a goal... and we (well, most of us, probably) haven't achieved it.
It's important to remember that while you have a goal, incremental steps towards it are the most important part - even if you never attain your goal, making steady progress towards it is important.
The most important, and usually the most difficult, stage of any journey is to start it.
Take some time today to think about what you can do to help a distressed worthy brother, and then schedule time to do it.
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