Blog 3558 – 08.01.2025

“Let’s Get To Work”

About thirty three years ago when my son Jay (Jonathan David James Wallace White) was two his grandpa Wallace Stokes gave him a toy tractor. Grandpa Stokes was a farmer and ran a farm equipment repair shop for many year. The little tractor resembles a John Deere tractor, one of dad’s favorite brands, and if you press the top down it plays a realistic tractor sound. Also two yellow buttons on the hood when pressed toot the horn or repeat a phrase that sounds like Wallace Mendel Stokes delivering his signature line: “Let’s get to work.”

Grandpa Stokes was famous for his work ethic and taught it to his children and grandchildren. Hearing that phrase from dad and from the little tractor over the years reminds me of John Wayne’s character in the movie Cowboys where a rancher is forced to train a group of very young inexperienced cowboys to help him move a his herd of cattle across country to sell in order to save his ranch. He wakes up the boys each morning with, “We’re burning daylight” which is cowboy for, “Let’s get to work.”

There is but one story of Jesus boyhood in the New Testament canon (the authorized books). It is the story of the twelve year old Jesus staying behind in Jerusalem after the family’s annual Passover pilgrimage to the Temple. His parents thought he was in the entourage from Nazareth so they did not miss him for several days and when they did they returned to Jerusalem and searched for him for several days more before finding him in the Temple asking intelligent questions beyond his years of the wisemen and scholars there.

His parents where noticeably upset when the found him and told him that they had been worried about him and that they had searched the city for him for days. The young Jesus replied, “Didn’t you know that I would be about my Father’s business?”

Grand Stokes business was farming and working on farm equipment, cowboy business is raising cattle and moving them to market. I happen to believe that our most important Family Business is in a word Loving – not arguing the Bible or trying to force others to think and believe as we do, but to simply love people and not just those who look, think, and act like us, but everybody. There was a song that I recall hearing in church when I was a boy that said, “Gimme that ole time religion, that makes me love everybody. That’s good enough for me.”

I think it is high time that we all took to heart the words of Grandpa Wallace Stokes and the little tractor and got to work carrying out The Family Business.

“Let’s Get To Work!”

Your friend, fellow traveler, and brother in the family business,

David James White