“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 85
“Where no oxen are, the crib is clean: but much increase is by the strength of the ox” (Prov. 14:4).
Another way of saying this is that profit is messy. Profit is intrusive. Really profitable times can really mess up your desk, or your schedule. But there are task-oriented employees who have no idea of the larger mission of the company, and who care only about getting the papers from one side of the desk to the other. For such a person, when a customer comes in with some interruption, instead of being seen as the reason for being in business, he is seen as a headache.
Compare two situations, two shops, about a week before Christmas. You walk into one and greet the clerk there who is a friend of yours. “How’s it going?” you ask. There are boxes everywhere, pandemonium behind the counter, and the phone ringing in the background. “Man, it’s the worst,” he says. Then you walk down the street and ask the same question of another friend, a clerk in another store, with a similar situation. He replies that this is the best month of the year, and that it should carry them into April. The first does not understand that the mess made by the oxen is directly related to whether you are going to be able to make a profit. All he can see is the mess, and the fact that he must wield the shovel. The second man has his eye on the goal, and is looking at the goal in wisdom.