Timothy is working for me.  I have him moving rocks out of my yard.  He carries them across the driveway, through the mud, over the creek, and throws them in a big rock pile in the woods.  Today he built a bridge over the creek so the wheelbarrow could make it to the other side.

I have a room of half-way finished drywall waiting for me, but when I came home this evening I headed outside with my new pick/mattock and shovel.  Some of the rocks were just too big for Timothy to move alone.

The funny part is how small the rocks look.  It looks like a rock the size of a football sticking up just enough to catch with a lawn mower. Feeling it out with the pick, it becomes clear that the rock is bigger.

We pulled one rock out that was three feet long, two feet wide, and a good foot thick.  I'd guess it was well over 600 pounds.  In the ground it looked like any other smaller rock, but it took us half an hour to get it out of the ground. It was so heavy that we had to pry it up with a big long sign post, stick a rock under to hold it while repositioning the fulcrum, then pry it again -- just to turn it over.

We decided to break it half.  If we had brains as big as that rock, maybe we wouldn't have tried.  We beat on it with a maul until our ears rang and our fingers tingled.  We realized we needed something bigger to tackle the beast. We found the biggest rocks we could lift over our heads, and dropped them on the bolder, again and again.  Timothy thought we should take a video of ourselves and submit it to stupidvideos.com.

Would you believe it?  We broke that rock.  A good third of it cracked off and the rest was just light enough so we could roll it -- over the next half hour -- the remaining thirty feet to the creek.

Sometimes it takes a nuckle-head to persist to the completion of great things.  Sometimes it takes more than that.  As with the big rock, it also took the grit of another person working toward the same goal.

I'm thinking about community.