When the Lesson Hits Home...

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

via GIPHY

IE, egg on face....

Ok, I am taking some ministry development classes at church.  It has been WONDERFUL, y'all.  I'm really, really enjoying it...Wednesday nights...up until the quarantine...were literally my favorite part of the week.

Of course, there has been homework.  One assignment for the 'Building a Team' class we just completed was to write an essay about a biblical character whose leadership style I admired.

Having just come through the desert with the Israelites in the Friday Blogging Bible Study, Moses was the obvious choice.

One of the points I made was that Moses did not want to lead the people.  He tried every which way he could to get out of that assignment...but, once he realized he wasn't allowed to say no, he put himself into it wholeheartedly.  Over and over again we read variations on 'Moses did exactly what the LORD told him to do.'  He didn't just fulfill the job, he did it to the utmost of his ability.  The job he didn't want.

Here's the summary paragraph from the essay:


What a challenge to leaders today…to release authority and not micro-manage their teams, to refuse to retaliate against insubordination but let God sort things out, to take on jobs we don’t necessarily want but are the best qualified for…to do exactly what God commands us to do, with all of our heart and skill and effort and no personal ambition. What would happen in the kingdom if we all had the passion to obey that Moses had?


Challenging, yes?

I didn't expect it to hit home so quickly.

See, back just before Christmas, we did a thing in the core class (the one that all the students are in, regardless of their chosen study track).  We  picked table leaders...folks who would be designated to lead the homework discussions each week.  Now, I had been kinda bouncing from table to table and that night I found myself sitting at a table at which I knew exactly one person.  And the selection of table leaders was done by popular vote at the table.  When the votes for our table were counted, it was 5 votes for yours truly and one vote for someone else.

Guess who cast the dissenting vote?

But, hey, being the designated discussion leader wasn't a terribly onerous thing to do...it pretty much just meant I had to be on top of my game and have my homework, um, discussion-ready  each week.

Aside from the one person I already knew, I basically just learned first names for the rest of the folks at the table. Two of them dropped out at the semester break, and then I missed the last two classes before everything shut down for the worldwide quarantine. (One, I was out of town, and the other I was doing the prep for one of those invasive screening procedures that the doctors insist upon when you pass the half-century mark and have a birthday ending in zero).  Then the classes shut down and we finished submitting our last assignments online.

With the continued shutdown, it became apparent that the final set of classes for the school year will be done online.  Well, we're getting used to the online thing, so that's ok.  I kinda thought my 'table leader' job was going to fall by the wayside and, you know, I was ok with that, lol.

Not so much.

Today I checked and the syllabus for the next class has been uploaded.  And...the table leaders are supposed to organize a zoom call (or other online meetup) weekly for their table folks so that we can continue to discuss the homework.

Y'all, that's when I realized I am a TERRIBLE table leader.  I didn't even get contact info ...heck, I didn't even get LAST NAMES... for the folks at my table.  Gulp.  I should have gotten everyone's name...checked up on them...but it was a job I didn't want, so I just did the bare bones requirements of it.

And here I'd written this lovely essay about Moses going above and beyond for HIS job-he-didn't-want.

I have been schooled.  SCHOOLED, I tell you.  And now I have to admit what a pathetically lame leader I was and eat humble pie to confess that I didn't bother getting contact info because...well, because I was just not willing to commit that much of myself to the job...and see if I can track down the full names and contact info for the folks at my table.

Because I'm going to have to be WAY more intentional about it for the next couple of months.

Time for me to suck it up and learn from the conclusions I so willingly wrote about last month.
Hopefully, the lesson will stick.

And I guess I'm about to increase my technical skills as well.  LOL.