Problems or Heroic Opportunities

I hate problems. I grow tired of solving problems. I especially hate other peoples problems that become my problems. But here is what I know about problems, they are usually heroic opportunities. If you help somebody solve a problem, if you create solutions where there don’t seem to be any or find ways around obstacles you become a hero. Now you are not a hero in the Supeman understanding of heroes, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but to the person who was struggling you become a hero. A hero is defined as, “a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act.” It is, therefore, a matter of perception. Some people see problems as obstacles, others as heroic opportunities. Some see them as a chance to pass the buck or avoid work or find an easy way out, others as a chance to “make some one’s day” or improve the lives of others, even if for only a short time.

My friend Tawana looks for heroic opportunities. When a problem lands in her lap, she marshals her resources, makes phone calls and does everything within her power, and sometimes beyond her power, to solve the problem. Some of the problems may be small, like helping a youth worker find a computer to use to check email from home or making sure their room has extra towels, but other problems can be much more serious. Like the time when one of our speakers needed a glucometer to check their blood sugar because they were diabetic or when a staff member was struggling with problems at home. In either situation she saw their problem as her problem and found ways around obstacles to find solutions.

I know another person, Jim Mousemount we will call him (not his real name) whose primary talent if finding problems and complaining about his problems. Then, instead of finding solutions, he attempts to pass the buck. He doesn’t see a problem as a heroic opportunity as much as a chance to fall short and make excuses. “We don’t have enough money.” “We don’t have enough staff.” He has a “we don’t” attitude and it infects everybody he comes into contact with. What is particularly aggravating is when the organization he works for internal problems become problems for their clients. When, instead of finding creative solutions, he attempts to pass his problem along to the person who is paying him to solve the problem. This, my friends, IS a problem!

I have this ridiculous notion that a client’s problem should be our problem and that our internal problems should NEVER be the client’s problem. That the reason they come to us is to help them find solutions and to provide them with answers to their needs. and their problems If we fail to be creators of solutions then we will have a problem, since then our clients/customers will find another place to solve their problems.

So, where does that leave us? It leaves us in positions to become heroes. I demands that we find creative solutions, explore unheard of ideas and open the box of our minds to possibilities that have never been tried before. Like I said earlier, I hate problems, but I love heroic opportunities.

Missing Church

On Saturday I visited St. Lukes United Methodist Church, Lubbock, Texas. I stood in the sanctuary. I stood in the sanctuary, like many other sanctuaries built in the 1970’s with is wooden curved pews and comfortable cushions, its rich new carpet and hardwood altar. It smelled clean, like polished wood and candles and had the feel of three decades of prayer soaked into its beams. There was a giant cross and a choir loft off to one side that seems to be waiting for the resonating sound of the baby grand piano to strike a worshipful chord. The rich, dark wood pulpit with etched cross stood on the left with the communion table centered against the wall under the cross. I could not bring myself to climb the six or seven steps up to the chancel area and look out over the congregational seating feeling that its pull may overwhelm me. I sat in the third row and just listened to the stillness of the worship space that would fill with worshippers less than twenty four hours from then. I sat there a few moments until I saw something drop upon the legs of my slacks and realized it was tears from my eyes. Then I felt the hot tears streaming down my face as I sat there waiting upon my host to do some last minute tasks to prepare to lead music the following morning. I got up and went out into the foyer to insure that he did not see me in such a state. I stood there looking out the front door at the weathered parking lot and tried to get myself back together.

I sat down this morning and tried to figure out why I had that response to being in a church. I have been in dozens of churches in the past three years since I left the pulpit to work at Lake Junaluska. There was something familiar about the place, something about the way it looked and smelled that triggered some powerful pastoral memories. Whether it was the look of Trinity UMC in New Bern or how it smelled like the sanctuary at Trinity UMC in Fayetteville or just how it felt to be in a church that really felt like a church again? I am not sure. So, I made a list of what I miss, and don’t miss about pasturing a local church.

Things I don’t miss:
• Contentious church members.
• Endless meetings.
• Charge conference forms.
• Colleagues with a competitive mindset about ministry, always comparing worship attendance and offering numbers.
• Proofreading bulletins.
• Vacation interruptions.
• Budget meetings.
• Tax headaches.
• Hospital visits at 2 a.m.
• Temperamental music leaders and staff conflict.

Things I miss:
• Knee hugs from children on Sunday.
• The smell of fresh flowers in the sanctuary.
• The taste of communion bread soaked in grape juice.
• Rehearsing and rewriting my sermon in an empty sanctuary on Friday or Saturday afternoons.
• Doing funerals for the saints of the church.
• The smell of infants on the morning of their baptism.
• The hugs of new members who found a church that they can feel loved and accepted in.
• Reading Christmas stories to pajama clad children before Christmas Eve worship.
• Good Friday worship ending in darkness and bolting the door.
• Weekly Eucharist and holding the loaf up and breaking it.
• The rhythm of the church year.
• The pressure to write a better sermon this week than last week, fifty-two times a year.
• Writing sermons in coffee houses and asking myself at the end of all the work, “so what?”

My call is here, now. So here I will serve until Christ leads me to another place. Until then I remain:

Consumed by the Call,
Marty

God, who makes the rough path smooth, and the winding path straight, grant me the ability to be fully present in the ministry I am living out right now. Show me what you would have me to do and be and keep me from vain ambition or change for the sake of change. Light my path with the light of the One who knows the way, Jesus. In whose name I pray. Amen.

Highest and Best Calling

Arlene Hewitt sat in her office one particularly reflective, dreary afternoon and said, “So I often wonder, is this the highest and best calling for this time in my life?” We had been discussing our work and our institutional frustration, irritation with bureaucracy and just the vocational angst that often accompanies those in ministry. If she had taken out a sock, put a brick in it and hit me in the head it would have been no less jarring. That was an incredible question. The question is far deeper than it initially seems.

First, is what I am doing my highest and best calling? Is it the most God-honoring thing I can be doing (highest) and is it the most effective use of my time (best)? What would the highest calling look like? Would it be constantly certain that I was in the presence of God in all that I do?

My highest calling, it would seem, would be actions that lead to eternal results. I mean, my job is to engage youth and young adults in matters related to their spiritual formation facilitate significant faith decisions and put them on the road to being fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. That seems pretty significant, even if I rarely get to actually see the fruits of my labor. I have stacks of commitment cards from last summer indicating that serious decisions were made, yet the question remains, is this the highest calling for my life? Is this the vocation that resonates with my heart song?

Next, is it my best calling? Am I doing what I can do most effectively to yield eternal results? Does ordering two-thousand Hawaiian leis count as a spiritual venture? Am I playing to my strengths and fully engaging my spiritual gifts? A lot of what I do does seem counter-intuitive to my gifts. I spend a lot of time in meetings and doing administrative tasks which are certainly not life-giving for me. Additionally, I spend precious little time communicating and teaching. Being one whose primary joy of the local church was the time I spent leading Bible study or preaching each week, it seems that I don’t often get to do what I used to love to do. Actually, I have even begun to doubt my abilities in these areas, partially from being out of practice I am certain, and also due to simple exhaustion. Is this my best calling?

The other part of the question is just as impactful as the first. When she said “for this time in my life,” it called into account our mortality. How often do I live my life certain of tomorrow? I’m not being morbid but I do have to realize that at 42 I am more than half done with the active, functional time of my life. Let’s say I make it to mandatory retirement for the United Methodist Church, 72. I essentially have only thirty years to make whatever mark upon this world I will make. When you are sixteen, thirty years seems like a lifetime. When you are 42 it looks significantly shorter.

There are books to read and, maybe, books to write. There are sunrises to see break through the dark of night and reflect upon God’s continual testimony of hope. There is laughter to share and tears to shed. So, is this the highest and best calling for my life right now? I honestly don’t know. I do know that it is what I am called to do at this moment and I will continue to honor that calling until God shed light upon the next path I am to travel because I continue to struggle and remain:

Consumed by the Call,

Marty

Gracious God, lead me in Your highest and best calling for my life for this time in my life, in the name of the One who lived that out with every breath, Jesus, I pray. Amen

Vocational Redemption

What is the most important result of your work? At the end of the day, week, month or year, if you have accomplished X then you will know that all of the time and effort has been worth the sacrifice. Is it a positive number at the bottom of the profit and loss statement? Is that the most important thing? Is it the lives that have been improved by your product, service, church or ministry? Is it the building of a building or the care of the poor? What is the most important result of your work?

You don’t know do you? Most of us don’t. We are seldom given clear direction and information about what we should consider vital and essential to our daily tasks. That is highly frustrating, especially for those of us Type A personalities that like clear objectives and goals. We spend nearly 2,000 hours a year (more for us work-a-holics) at our vocation without clear institutional priorities. Our supervisors try to give us “pep talks” and motivate us but their objectives are ambiguous. Yes profit is important, but so is quality and service. Of course we want you to make other’s lives better and serve the poor, but only if a profit can be generated in the process. Make disciples and make money, yeah, that’s your objective. We have carefully crafted mission statements, purpose statements, and value statements. We then have statements about our statements. Definitions about the words in our statements, reformatted vision statements. Most of these statements in placed carefully on the cover of a three ring binder or hanging on the wall over the entrance or water fountain and promptly forgotten. Then we go back to work and try to please everyone, customers, supervisors, CEOs and board members, never quite sure who is the most important master because it changes by the day.

Didn’t Jesus say something about not being able to serve two masters? Don’t I recall something about you will love the one and hate the other? He didn’t define which was the “right one” and which was the “wrong one,” just that one will resonate with your heart song and the other will annoy you and cause you heartburn.

So what is the answer? If we aren’t going to get a divine pronouncement from above about what is vital and essential, what do we do? There are a few things we can do to help us keep the main thing, the main thing.

• Focus on your passionate strengths: Marcus Buckingham does a great job teaching people to play to their strengths. He advises us that we should spend 50-80% of our day doing things that “strengthen us.” We should do things that we love, that resonate with our heart song, that are the reason you took the job in the first place. Now very few people can spend all of their time playing to their strengths, as he says, that’s why they call it work. But if we can spend some significant time each day doing things, activities, tasks and building relationships that we enjoy and are passionate about, it makes the other stuff bearable.

• Define what is important to you: This is key. If nothing you do during your daily existence really seems important and vital to you, then you either need to reformat your vocation or change it. You can starve your soul to death by simply doing things that drain it and empty it day after day. If it doesn’t matter then why is it being done? The days I feel best when I return home are the days when I feel like I have accomplished something important. It might just be one thing, one phone call, one contact, one task, but that one thing was important to me and it puts the rest of the day in perspective. On the contrary, on the days when I go home without feeling like anything I did mattered, like I just went through the motions and filled the seat behind my desk, then I feel worthless.

• Plan your day: You need to know your rhythms. Are you a morning person? Then do what you love at the time you are best, save the email and mundane tasks for your least productive time of the day. I am freshest and most productive in the morning. That is when I need to do things that require my utmost attention. I go into a slump around 2 pm. That is when I should answer mundane email, go through the mail and do things I dread. Why waste my optimal time doing the most dreaded tasks. But that is exactly what we do isn’t it? We go into work, if we are morning people, full of caffeine and energy for the day and then get bogged down with email and busy work, forgetting to utilize our best hours of our most enjoyed tasks. Master your day, make a plan.

So, how do I deal with lack of real, institutional priorities? I have to set personal priorities and work from there. Working from my strengths, knowing what is important to me personally and making an action plan will redeem the time and allow me to deal with the frustration of the lack of true institutional priorities. So my goals will be:
• To spend the first hour at my desk writing and reflecting every day.
• Begin defining the task that is most important for me to do that feeds me each day.
• Spend fifteen minutes each day to maximize the important and minimize the mundane.

How about you?

Consumed by the Call,
Marty
Gracious God, who grants me 1,440 minutes each and every day, help me to live in the awareness that You should define what is most important in my day and help me live in the shadow of your will. In the name of the One who lived every day on purpose, Jesus the Christ, I pray. Amen