Oh What a Night...

While I had every intention of continuing my thoughts on childhood tonight, I'm too wiped. I just got home from work and spent from 6-10pm teaching, non-stop on credit cards, how they work and how to collect on them. That's not even including the rest of the teaching I did this afternoon before dinner. While four hours of non-stop teaching may not seem like alot to those of you who do it for a living, remember: credit cards aren't nearly as exciting as world history, bible or even literature. It ranks right up there with teaching 4 hours of math or grammar. I never cease to marvel at how much credit card junk and gibberish I've amassed into my head over the last 2 years. I used the phrase, "Fee non-assesment to prevent negative amortization as per FDCPA guidelines" on more than one occaision tonight. The scary part is that I actually know what that means and how to use it in a sentence. Even scarier is the fact that several of you reading this do to. Goodnight!

7 Habits Update

I've completed day 2 (out of 3) of my 7 Habits of Highly Effective People class at work. God obviously want me to learn this stuff, because in the last 10 years this is the 3rd time I've been through the material at no cost to self (in fact twice I was paid to go through it). I've finally matured enough to see the value of it. It also helps to have heard Driscoll endorse it (he's cooler than Fressle :-) Anyway, it really does have a lot of common sense wisdom to it and it is one good way (though there are certainly others) to maximize your effectivness and productivity in life. Ironically, based on my own perception as well as feedback from several of my peers in the form of a survey, I already operate by quite a few of the principles intuitively. Nevertheless, I still have plenty of room to improve. Some of the areas on my feedback from the survey were: 1) Learning to delegate 2) Stop procratinating and 3) Planning ahead to avoid crises. Hands down my greatest strength is Habit 5 - seek first to understand and then to be understood. This is so much a part of who I am it's not even funny. I think it was Socrates that said "The unexamined life is not worth living" and i'm starting to agree more and more; particularly in view of the fact that one day it WILL be examined, like it or not. Anyway, good stuff and I hope tools that will help me become a more effective church planter someday soon as well as putting feet to the concept of glorifying God by enjoying Him forever.

Two Caveats: 1) I'm still no "covey-ite" though the man is a tremendous speaker. 2) I still have not repented about Maxwell :-)

In the Mix

God's been using my job to teach me a lot lately and I want to honor Him for that. Often the only thing to praise God for with a job in collections is that it meets your needs. However, I've been actively trying to learn all the life lessons I can from improving my teaching skills, to developing my leadership abilities with the opportunities He's given me. Since back in my intern days of mocking John Maxwell, I've never believed that the church should be run like a business (and Fressel still hates me for mocking his boy); nevertheless, working both as a collector and even more so now as a supervisor/trainer for new hires and manager trainee I've learned how to be more assertive and direct (two character traits I've known I'd need to develop for years). Yet, even these gains, bring with them more challenges...the ever present need for balance (yes, I can use that word 5 years later having detoxed from college-and I don't mean alchohol). And in all of that God had reinforced some even more fundamental lessons:

1) The constant need for repentance (something I've been doing a lot of lately). Whether it be for my impatience with teaching somebody whose a little slow on the uptake - impatience generated by underlying arrogance because they're not getting it when I teach and the audacity that I might have to adapt my style any further (as you can see double repentance here) - or the use of my tongue when discussing some of our low performers with my peers...repentance has been a common theme.

2) The constant need for balance. Yeah, I alluded to it above, but I'll elaborate. It's easy to excel in the corporate world by being direct, not being afraid to execute and making good business decisions in a cold and calcuated way. It's a bit more complex (and at times impossible) to do all that and incarnate the atonement simultaneously. This was something originally brought to my attention by a Tim Keller lecture and again more recently in McKnight's book A Community Called Atonement (and some influence in my thinking from Drama of Doctrine here too - that book continues to have a paradigm shifting effect on me - impovisation and all that). As I've moved into increasingly managerial roles trying to exemplify Kingdom values and flesh out the atonement has become increasingly complex. Nevertheless, I've been provided with AMPLE opportunity to apply the Gospel to the workaday world, for which I'm thankful. Nothing more fun (or rigorous) than the missional task of contextualiztion.

3) Life experience. I don't know how else to title this, but the point is I have a FAR better grasp of what life is like for everday blue collar workers - cubicle jockey's if you will. Since this demographic often makes up a large piece of the pie in many churches, I can far better empathize now (and I finally understand why people think Dilbert is hilarious). It comes back to contextualization because being there myself, I can relate and offer concrete illustrations. Discussing contextualization of the Gospel in the seminary class with a bunch of other guys with no kids and whose wife's pay all the bills (yup, that was me) is entirely different from slugging it out in the trenches everyday, depriving your best hours from your family to go support them by dragging yourself to a job you don't like to do, made up of tasks that are hard to justify. Surely there can be more than this; and now I can say yes there is. If you can find meaning and value in collections, you can find it just about anywhere.

Having said all that I have a LOOOOOOOOOONG way to go and appreciate your prayers.