When you hold a man’s hand what does it feel like? Of all the hands that I have held, the greatest men have always had the ugliest hands. They are hard and dry and bruised and bleeding. They are calloused and cracking, covered in grease and oil, and not a pretty sight. Yet for me, these hands are the strongest, the bravest, the safest hands that one can hold, and they belong to my dad. President Roosevelt once said:
“I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing, I admire him.”
President Roosevelt had the right idea over six decades ago when he said that he admired hard working men. As the years have passed, the hard working men have become few and far between. Hard work, real back breaking, sweat making work, is becoming a job that many people do not want to do. I have a certain admiration for all the men who are willing to work to their utmost physical potential for measly pay yet they never seem to complain. My father aspired to work hard for everything, earning every penny that he ever had or would make. So my father, just like his father before him, worked tireless and endless hours of work from sun up to sundown to achieve this goal. There is not a single morning in my entire childhood that I remember waking up before my dad, and typically I was asleep before he even finished working. My father managed to single-handedly provide for a family of five for years on his own, never once complaining about the laborious work that he was forced to do to make a living. I cannot think of a more driven man to work hard than my father and the greatest achievement he could hope for would be to pass this work ethic onto his children. In a world where most jobs don’t involve breaking a sweat, the men I look up to the most are the ones with the ugliest hands, because their true measure of worth cannot be described in dollar signs, but rather the love they have in their hearts for the families and the hard work they put in to provide for them.
Now let me ask you this: are your hands ugly too? Are they hard and dry and bruised and bleeding? Are they calloused and cracking, covered in grease and oil, and not a pretty sight? Will the legacy that you leave behind show that you earned everything you ever made like the hardworking fathers that came before us? The great Winston Churchill once said:
"Some people dream of success, while others wake up and work hard at it."
So maybe we all need to take a lesson from these hardworking fathers we all know and love and wake up and work hard for it, make your hands ugly. Thank you for all of you dads out there with ugly hands, we appreciate you more than you could ever know.
