The Build I Can't Invoice

Josh :) grateful
Aug 29
2 min read

Labor Day.

A holiday built on the backs of workers, meant to honor sweat and sacrifice… and yet here I am, still thinking about work—even as the universe hands me an extra day off to mark another year around the sun.

Summer’s worked its way out. I’m enjoying coffee outside, a cool breeze cutting through the palm trees as they rustle 20 feet in the sky. There’s even a chill this morning as I sip and ponder the irony: the one day set aside to honor labor, and my mind is already turning back to it. Tools in the truck, a shower half-finished, and a long drive ahead for Tristan’s football game in Bullhead City (a bombshell from Laughlin, NV). On Tuesday we got the news: Tristan, along with a small handful of underclassmen, had been asked to suit up for this week's varsity game.

This week, the labor was real. Shower 1 wrapped up and complete—a project that fought me in the details but came out right in the end.

And now, I’ve got Shower 2 sitting at a clean stopping point—demo done, groundwork in place, ready for the next push. That’s where I left it, trading guilt for the rare gift of an unplanned Friday off.

That’s the tension, right? We grind all week to get ahead, to knock down the to-do list, to feel like we’ve earned the weekend—and then life whispers, “Hey, don’t forget why you’re doing all this in the first place.”

Because there’s another kind of labor that doesn’t show up on invoices or job sheets... being a Dad. Driving a few 3.5 hours to sit in the stands, to watch our boy under the Friday night lights, to cheer for his teammates alongside the few parents willing to make the hike for a moment time won’t return. That’s labor too—the kind of labor I’ll never regret.

What hits me is this: labor isn’t just the paycheck work. It’s anything we willingly pour ourselves into. The job site teaches me grit, but it’s the road trips, the ball games, the family time that teach me presence. One feeds the other. Both matter.

So this Labor Day, I’m grateful. Grateful for the kind of work I get to do with my hands. Grateful for the kind of work I choose to do with my heart. The shower can wait. The blog can wait (sorta). But Tristan’s game won’t happen twice.

To build is to be. And sometimes, that means building memories.

Have a grateful weekend!