This week, Soren shares an individual reflection on work, dads, and family life.

I laughed. In 1990 at the age of 15, I got my first summer job pulling weeds for $5 an hour from parking lots of Suburban Buick in Wheaton, IL. I remember my dad or mom dropping me off on Saturday mornings with a bag lunch and picking me up in the late afternoon. When the sun beat down and it felt hard, I had only to think of how many packs of Topps baseball cards I’d be able to buy with my earnings.  
 
On some days, the owner, Gabor Bushy, would come out and check on me,with his broad smile and thick Hungarian accent. Later I learned that as a 16-year-old, he and his parents escaped by foot during the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Born in 1939, he had already survived the Nazis.  

“He came to America with a deep appreciation for all the freedoms and opportunities this country has to offer,” his wife Kimberly told the Chicago Tribune at his passing in 2003. “He never took his citizenship for granted because he lived through the Nazis and the communists, and knew what the rest of the world was like.”
 
Kimberly recalled how Gabor would say, “Americans have no idea just how good they have it.” (I heard him say that too, but staring down at dandelions in the cracks of hot asphalt on a summer day, I didn’t feel that I had it so good.)
 
Within two summers, I was making a jaw-dropping $8 an hour installing and repairing garage doors for Gregory Gendel, a Ukrainian Jewish refugee who fled the Soviet Union just one year before the fall of communism. Up close to his relentless drive and energy, I felt slow, always behind. But then Gregory would lean over and teach me something—how to hold the winding bar or remove the torsion spring drums, or get the grease off my hands. 
 
Back home on Saturdays, I knew that no easy street awaited me. After allowing us to eat Frosted Flakes and watch cartoons for a few hours on Saturday mornings, my dad always called down the stairs and “invited” us boys to “come up and give me a hand” (translation: a day of yardwork at either no pay or a sporadic allowance, whenever he or mom remembered).
 
That’s why Bushy and Gendel—as other-worldly, gritty and hard-driving as they were—seemed, at the end of the day, rather familiar figures for me. I knew how hard my dad worked. (How prodigiously my mom worked is a different reflection). Now, with my dad no longer with us these past five years, I would give almost anything to step back into one of those Saturdays of my youth, to work alongside him for a few more hours.

A new season is here—and with it, fall routines and plenty of work to do in our homes, garages and yards. In some sense, my days working for Gabor, Gregory and Dad seem like distant memories. But in another sense, our kids are just waiting for us to invite them into our labor, our household economy, the “daily society” of our households.
 
As philosopher John Cuddeback writes, “Human formation begins with certain ordinary functions of daily life. Wherever there is life, there is laundry, and dust, and dishes. These chores can provide a regular opportunity for members to work together for the sake of the household.”

Our kids may not be eating Frosted Flakes and watching Flintstones, but they are—despite whatever protests or moodiness—yearning for us to call them. To invite them. To teach them. To lean over them in love. To spend the day together in our little Nazareth, under the sun, working with soil, boards, hammers, learning how to use tools to repair and build up the world around us.