For two years right after I was married I worked on a construction job as a track-drill operator and a powder monkey, that is someone who works with dynamite. I worked with another man that was grumpy, mean, irritable, and always mad about something. He was super hard to work with and it was impossible to make him happy. I told my Dad about the situation right after I started working this job, and he told me that it was my responsibility to figure out how to get along with him. I told my Dad that getting along with him was impossible and he responded by saying, “no such person exists, hard but not impossible.” I thought to myself, “Easy for you to say, you aren’t the one working with him,” My Dad said, “figure out what ticks him off and don’t do it.” One of the things that would set him off was when I would read my little New Testament while we were waiting for a ten foot piece of steel to drill down in the rock, which took about ten minutes and then I would add another ten foot piece which took another ten minutes. I figured that reading my New Testament during that ten minutes was good use of my time. One day I started reading my New Testament during our lunch break and he didn’t seem to care at all, I also read it during our 10:00 am coffee break and he seemed to care less. I was curious so I asked him about it, and he said that lunch breaks and coffee breaks were my time, I could do what I wanted, but the ten minutes that it took to drill a piece of steel down was company time. Instead of reading I ought to be greasing the machinery, or packing dynamite up the hill or cleaning up the sight where the next hole would be drilled. He said, “pay attention, look around, you should be able to find something to do, we don’t pay you to sit on your butt reading, even if it is the Bible!” So after that every time he got grumpy I would think to myself, “what did I just do that he didn’t like, and it didn’t take much thinking to figure it out, and I adjusted what I did. Sometimes it wasn’t job-related, just something he didn’t like. He listened to Paul Harvey every day at lunch time and if I made any noise while Paul was on he would growl at me, so I went off some distance, sat on a five gallon can and read my New Testament.

Romans 14:19 So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another.

Hebrews 12:14 Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.

It took about six months before I learned all the things that pushed his buttons. We never became buddies but we did get along and we made a lot of money blowing up rock together.