2.15-How should employees be treated?

2.15-

Today I wanted to write regarding my dad and the way he treated his employees.  

Early in my life there were employees that picked cotton.  These were traveling bands of people who came in groups and lived in shacks on our property.  He would pay them the going rate for their work, but treated them with great concern and kindness.  There was never any kind of abuse of them that he would tolerate.  Once a young man went swimming after work and drowned in a pool of ours.  It deeply moved my dad and he hurt over this loss for a long time.   

Later during dad’s retirement he hired his good friend, Herman Crowley, to work for him fixing fences and cutting wood and repairing the barns and outbuildings at our place.  Mainly he wanted the companionship and friendship and he thought it would also help Hermon and his family.  He loved them all. 

 

He always tried to give these workers a little more than the normal pay whether in the form of food or drink or just in the way he treated them.  I believe it was because he had gone to a church to worship God for all his life.  He was a follower of Jesus who taught His disciples to remember that the God of justice and righteousness is observing all this.

Mark 12.

12 And He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard and put a ^[a]wall around it, and dug a vat under the wine press and built a tower, and rented it out to ^[b]vine-growers and went on a journey. ² At the harvest time he sent a slave to the vine-growers, in order to receive some of the produce of the vineyard from the vine-growers. ³ They took him, and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. ⁴ Again he sent them another slave, and they wounded him in the head, and treated him shamefully. ⁵ And he sent another, and that one they killed; and so with many others, beating some and killing others. ⁶ He had one more to send, a beloved son; he sent him last of all to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ ⁷ But those vine-growers said to one another, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours!’ ⁸ They took him, and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. ⁹ What will the ^[c]owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine-growers, and will give the vineyard to others. ¹⁰ Have you not even read this Scripture:

‘The stone which the builders rejected,
This became the chief corner stone;
¹¹ This came about from the Lord,
And it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

¹² And they were seeking to seize Him, and yet they feared the ^[d]people, for they understood that He spoke the parable against them. And so they left Him and went away.

Larry Wishard

2.9.18