If you had to choose another job I wonder what that job would be?  Perhaps the move from being a teacher to a builder?  Out of the kitchen as a cook into a hospital as a nurse? Away from the desk to a more physical job where papers and computers do not dominate?  A job where you worked on your own?  Perhaps a job where you were your own boss – where everyone fitted in with one’s hopes and expectations?

 

It is interesting, is it not, to ask upon what these choices might be based?  What is it that we find frustrating or difficult or demanding about our own responsibilities?  In what way might we want our work lives to be easier or even more fulfilling.

 

Whatever the answers to these questions I think few of us would wish to exchange our present responsibility for that of President of the United States of America!  And if that is the preferred choice of a new job, then we might well have some significant reason to feel concerned about your hopes, expectations and desires…..

 

I hope that some of us might be able to tear ourselves away from our jobs to watch the presidential inauguration today in Washington D.C.  Just imagine what kind of expectation surrounds Barack Obama and his responsibilities.  Extraordinary, the sheer weight of hope that rests on his shoulders.  What amazing challenges face him both within the economic health of the Western Capitalist economies, but also as the West positions itself alongside the Middle East and other countries where peace and justice is so fragile. 

 

So spare a thought for Barack Obama.  Let us join with so many others in expressing our good will and deepest best wishes and prayers for a new president with all the possibilities that emerge from that.  And what ever our own frustrations within our work let us never forget that compared to his, they must pale into insignificance!

 

God bless America and God bless Barack Obama.