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    There’s no such thing as a “self-made person.” Everyone who achieves something worthwhile stands on the shoulders of those who have come before. He learned hard work and principled behavior from a father, Scout leader, or teacher. She had a professor in college, a mentor at the company, or an advocate when nobody else believed in her. I’ll bet you are naming some of yours as you read this.

    Now it’s time to give back. There is someone in your world who needs a teacher, guide, and role model. Maybe it’s your child. It could be your brother’s little girl. It might be a teenager whose father died or walked away. Perhaps it is the new person at work. It could well be someone watching you without your awareness of it.

    I read the story of a man who found a note written by Desert Pete. It was in a tin can tied to an old pump handle on a remote desert trail.

    Dear Friend,

    This pump is all right as of June 1932. I put a new sucker washer in it and it should last for at least five years. But the washer dries out and the pump has to be primed. So under the white rock to the north I’ve buried a bottle of water, out of the sun and corked up.

    There’s enough water in the bottle to prime the pump, but not if you take a drink first. Pour about one-fourth of the water and let it soak the leather washer. Then pour in the rest medium fast and pump like crazy. You’ll get water.

    This well has never run dry. Have some faith. Then, when you’ve pumped all the water you need, fill the bottle and put it back where you found it for the next feller who travels this path.

    Desert Pete

    Like the next person who found that note, we need to be reminded to leave things in good order for those who will come after us. And that means paying attention to the instructions God left for us about integrity and effort. It means having faith that they’ll produce a good result for us, that God will never fail us. Then we leave something for those who are going to be coming down the path after we’re gone.

    If you are grateful for what you were bequeathed as an citizen, or in your family, or at work, or in the Body of Christ, be unselfish enough to remember that others are yet to come after you. Leave something they can use to prime the pump.

© 2000, Rubel Shelly. Used by permission. From Rubel Shelly's "FAX of Life" printed each Tuesday. See Faith Matters for previous issues of the "FAX of Life."