Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career. To do it, he had to strike out 1,330 times. An average batter in his day held a statistic that of his batting outs, 12% of them were strikeouts. Of Ruth’s batting outs: 24% were strikeouts. Double the average.

Probably some baseball stats you’ve heard before…or at least vaguely referenced. The whole point being that in trying to swing for the fences, a lot of times you’ll strikeout.

Or as I heard it said recently, “If failure isn’t an option, success isn’t either.”

Obviously a Ruth had a lot going for him to allow the failures. Namely, a coach who put up with it. Think of how Ruth’s hitting strategy would have changed, had he been punished for his strikeouts. I’d imagine few of us would have any idea who he even was.

But his coach realized Ruth could produce great things…if he was also allowed to produce horrible things.

It’s just a matter of interpretation whether it’s worth tolerating the bad outcomes in order to get the good outcomes.

Of course, you need to be able to hit home runs for someone to put up with all your strikeouts in the first place.

I stumbled across this quote from Rick Warren today:

If you want to build an equipping church, you have to tear down the idol of excellence. Why? Because most people are not excellent; most people are not extraordinary. Most people are ordinary. If you’re going to do ministry through ordinary people, you have to give up the notion of excellence.

If your highest value is excellence, then you aren’t going to entrust ministry to ordinary people. You are going to go out and find the very best people. You won’t risk putting a developing person into a significant role either, because you don’t want to compromise excellence.

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One of the things I am quickly discovering is that I need to have a decision making filter. By that, I mean a very quick “pass or fail” style test that I put decisions, statements, thoughts, actions, strategies, programs, and the kitchen sink through. I’m still very, VERY new at what I’m doing…but I think I have the makings of a simple decision making filter.

I’m basing it loosely on Luke 15. When Jesus is telling a parable about the prodigal son returning home. As he comes back, he’s met with 2 incredibly different responses from his loving father and his older brother.

His older brother meets him with judgment, a sense of entitlement, jealousy, exaggeration, hostility, stand-offish-ness, and a strict adherence to rules. In contrast the loving father meets him with grace, acceptance, restoration, love, generosity, celebration, and…let’s be honest here…the breaking of a not-too-small-amount of religious “rules” and observances.

So my filter is, when it comes down to it, incredibly simple… (more…)

We usually think of the story Jesus tells in Luke 15 as ‘the prodigal son,’ I like to think of it as the story of ‘the loving father’ instead.

We know the drill, son takes off in a huff with his dad’s money, gets a job in a hog pen, realizes it’s stupid, comes back home, father accepts him back into the family, throws him a party, his brother is ticked off, the end.

Sometimes we can look at this story, and lose ourselves in the order of events. Sometimes, in an attempt to behave like the loving father we put the events in the wrong order.

See, there is a huge problem with parties…by themselves.

Before the party is thrown, the father welcomes the son back into the house. Back into the family. The party does not take the son out of the hog pen, out of the pit, that has already happened.

If you skip that step…if you try to bypass the restoration back into the family, back into the house, back into the positive system, back into the revived & renewed relationship…back into that healthy environment that you’ve created away from that destructive one…

If you skip that step, and people go straight into the party…when the party is over…where do they go next? Right back into the pit. The hog pen. The hell you took them out of in the first place.

They don’t come into the house.

Parties are worthless if everything goes back to normal as soon as they are over.

There needs to be the better life, the restored relationship, the new system, a removal of the dysfunction before the party occurs; so there is actually something worth celebrating.

The party is a celebration of something new, not a brief interruption before you are sent back to the same crap.

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There is a fascination in some circles with taking people identified as “leaders” and teaching them how to be “servants.” You know, and label it “servant leadership.”

You’d try to contort people who were in leadership roles to make them more humble, self-sacrificing, authentic, transparent, empathetic, etc.

Normally met with less than awesome success. It hardly ever catches on when approached from that angle.

Instead, I think that we should look for people who are already servants and make them leaders.

Find those who already give, and give, and give of themselves. People who are incredibly humble (instead of just the false humility), people who live their lives authentically & transparently, people who consider others more important than themselves. The good listeners, the self-aware, the kind, the caring, the selfless.

You know who I’m talking about, surely you immediately thought of so-and-so as a real “servant.”

Why not take those people and give them the tools to increase their influence? Show them and guide them in how to instruct others to live by their example? Point to them and say “be like that!”

I bet it’s a whole lot easier to teach a ‘servant’ how to lead, than to teach a ‘leader’ how to serve. How about you?

>No beating around it, let’s just go straight in. North Point Church hired me full time this past Wednesday as the “Connections Coach”!!! (insert happy dance here)

For those of you who know me well, you’re aware of what a huge deal this is for me. For those of you who know me a little bit…this is a huge deal for me! I turned in my 2 weeks at my old job…this is really happening.

I’m going to work closely with my good friend (and new boss!) Connections Director Tim Perkins…go bother him on Facebook & Twitter, you’ll be glad you did.

Connections is basically nearly everything in the church that deals with ‘adults’ ministries. Our small groups (connect groups), getting people integrated into the church through serving, spiritual development, creating points of entry for new people, etc.

At the expense of getting all sappy…this is a life changing thing for me. I don’t quite know how to emotionally deal with this transition, and in some ways it hasn’t fully hit me yet. I’m at a point of excited & happy that can’t really be put into words. This is something that I convinced myself for the past 7 years just wasn’t going to happen for me. That choices I had made in my life weren’t going to allow it. And now that it is…it’s very powerful.

If you wouldn’t mind, I’d really appreciate that you pray for me with this new part of my life. I want to get right in now and get rolling on it. Thanks so much for letting me share this with you, and thanks for all the support!

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>A friend of mine shared a quote with me a while ago…well…actually he has shared it with me several times. He uses it as somewhat of a lens to look through; to guide his attitude as he engages with pastors:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching.

-1 Timothy 5:17

Don’t do this…

Now…there’s a lot to pick through in that little piece of advice. If you’re anything like me, your brain will instantly begin searching through ways to undermine the heart of what is being said.

• You’ll pick up on that word “well” and make excuses that you don’t have to honor pastors who don’t minister excellently…and then you start making a mental hierarchy of what is “kinda” well and “mostly” well and “very” well…
• You may also look at the phrase double honor and start questioning what that even means. Seeing as it’s “double” something, you’d just look at the regular amount of honor you give everyone else and then pay that much to pastors…right? Even better if the regular amount isn’t very much.
• Or you could grab a hold of that “preaching and teaching” at the end. Make an argument that this would only apply to people who do both…and not one or the other. Surely that would be a way to skirt this whole concept.

The point is that it’s way too easy to dance around some practical advice because our own pride gets in our way. There’s something inside us that says people’s honor, respect, etc is all relative to each other. So if we make someone else look bad, that will make us look good. And likewise, if we make someone else look good, that will make us look bad.

That’s garbage. Don’t think it.

Why a pastor?

The reality is that pastors have it rough. They find themselves constantly on the brunt of criticism, hostility & undermining. Many of them have been betrayed & abandoned by people they would have sworn had their best interests at heart.

After a while, you stop trusting people. You start to see & expect the worst. You’ve been torched by so many that you start to build up walls to protect yourself. You don’t let others in because you’ve done it before, and gotten wrecked time and again.

Eventually, this can lead to people thinking that a pastor is setting himself apart. That he makes himself hard to get a hold of because he doesn’t care. Or he doesn’t want to be bothered with the “little” people. This can make people grumble about him even more, feel disconnected from him, and look at him as some kind of celebrity…or a douchebag.

But all the while, what’s really happening is the pastor is tired of being crushed and betrayed.

So we have this advice from Paul, a saying on how to respond. That requires us putting away our own insecurities to come alongside someone with pressures, frustrations, failures, betrayals and hurts that many of us can’t imagine. It requires us putting away some of our pride that says it will make us look smaller to make someone look better. Seems kinda Jesus-y to me for that matter.

Why honor?

Call it honor, respect, whatever…it doesn’t matter. Personally, I think it can be a powerful thing for a pastor to be surrounded by people who honor/respect them. Publicly and privately. Who don’t question & undermine their motivations, who give him the benefit of the doubt…even when the reasoning isn’t understood.

And if a pastor really is operating from a context of betrayal, pressure, frustration and undermining; how powerful would it be if there was a group who legitimately respected & honored him? Not just pretended to.

Doesn’t that trickle down over time? Wouldn’t that help to break down some of the relational isolation a pastor has placed themself in? Doesn’t that lead to a spiritually/emotionally/relationally healthier pastor than before? And doesn’t that lead to a healthier church?

So what do you do?

How do we take this advice and do something with it? How can we set aside our pride and consider someone higher than we consider ourselves? Do you even agree that this is something worth doing?

I’m interested in what you think, & thanks for reading.

>So I just got back from a week long trip to Orlando…and it was exhausting! We took 1 day and tried to do just about everything the Magic Kingdom had to offer. We spent 14 hours straight in the park. From 9am to 11pm. With our 5 year old daughter Brooke going strong with no meltdowns all day. It was quite impressive.

My wife, mother, daughter, brother and I were in the line for the ride “It’s a Small World” for about 40 minutes.

About 50% of the line

We were snaking and weaving through the line along with a thousand others for our turn at a 10 minute boat ride amongst decades old animatronic dolls singing one of the most haunting songs in existence. We made it to the front of the line, get in position to be the next group into the boat…and disaster strikes.

The boats got stuck.

There were no sirens, none of the workers really said anything. You just started to notice that the line stopped moving. And if you looked backwards down the river a bit where full boats come up to unload their passengers you noticed a boat that was stuck in the water and holding up the show.

Within 5 minutes of this disaster several things happened:

• The ride operator called up to the ride supervisor to report the problem
• The ride supervisor called ride maintenance to fix the problem
• Ride maintenance came and fixed the problem in a matter of seconds of being on site
• About a thousand people in line cheered
• The ride went right back to normal as if nothing had happened at all

While witnessing this, I couldn’t help but think of several metaphors wrapped up in this simple event.

Surely we’ve all had times where we’re just going through lives as normal, everything is fantastic…but all of a sudden our boat gets stuck. Maybe we hit a rough patch in our marriage, have trouble raising our children, you realize you’re not satisfied with your job, maybe you lose your job completely. Whatever it is in your life that throws it out of whack, that’s your boat getting stuck.

And you know the feeling, you feel trapped. The people in the boat realized the situation was out of their control. Sure they could have seized control by getting out of the boat and wading through the water…but that wouldn’t have been the best thing to do. They had to wait. They hoped that someone with more information and knowledge than they had would be able to fix the problem. Fortunately, they were right. And there were steps to solve the problem already lined out and in motion.

1) Admit when you are in over your head

The ride operator knew they didn’t have the expertise to solve the problem (come on, they’re just hitting a button and telling people to not fall off the boat) so they passed it up the chain of command to their supervisor. Likewise, the supervisor knew enough to realize it was beyond their realm of training so maintenance was called in.

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Maybe for you it’s recognizing that you’re not superman, despite your best efforts. You really can’t tackle that 8 man project alone, or you can tell due to your child’s crazy fits at the drop of a hat that perhaps your parenting style is a bit off. We seem to have such a huge amount of shame attached to the realization that we can’t do everything. I think this is such a bad cycle to get into. Realize that sometimes you just need help doing what you can’t do alone.

2) Have the right people in place to solve problems

To be honest, it’s pretty impressive to watch the right people solve a problem. 

The two maintenance men swooped in and knew exactly what to do. One went down to the main floor to check for anything blocking the path, the other was in the control booth dealing with the control boards. They were in the room and gone within 60 seconds.

We see maintenance men like this in all kinds of areas of our lives, we know who to call for little problems in our lives…but we tend to think we can solve the big ones. We seem so afraid to consult parenting books, see professional counselors, be honest with our struggles to our friends who have been through similar situations. We have these ‘maintenance men’ in our lives (or at least we can rent them if they’re professionals!) we should use them so we’re not stuck scratching our heads all the time on how to solve our unsolvable problems.

3) Solve the problem fast, get the recognition…

Or give the recognition, as the case may be. The maintenance men who fixed the ride didn’t stop and take a bow. They did their job professionally, quickly and left. While they were leaving the crowd cheered them off. Not because they were prompted, but because they were legitimately grateful.

If you’re solving a problem, you need to leave the person you were helping legitimately grateful for your assistance. And if you’re being helped, surely you should properly show your appreciation for the assistance. 

People don’t necessarily want a fanfare…but recognition doesn’t hurt. Letting someone know who much you do appreciate them goes a long way.

4) Move on

Once the maintenance men left, the ride went back to operating normally. I think so often as we deal with our problems in life, we never allow ourselves to get to this point.

The boat is back on track, it’s moving through the water and we are stubbornly refusing to move along with it. We live in the realm of when things were broken, not when they were fixed.

I see this so true in my life, especially spiritually. I often find myself replaying my own failures and shortcomings over again in my mind…despite God’s promises in Jesus that he has taken care of all that! What better way to guarantee that we’ll never continue through the ride than if we convince ourselves our boat is broken.

And how sad is it when we don’t realize it has been fixed. That all of this brokenness, shame, anger, frustration is completely unnecessary. It may have held a purpose at one point, but that’s over. We don’t need to live in it. We need to get back on the ride and allow it to move us forward. There is no purpose in repairing the boat if the riders refuse to believe it’s repaired.

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

-Plato

What comes to your mind when you read that quote?

I’ll go first.

I think it’s so easy to get wrapped up in our needs, wants, desires, etc that we start to look at other people as expendable resources.

We see ourselves as the star in some reality show, where everyone we come into contact with is some sort of supporting character, who only exists to further along our wishes and our agenda. When we run into conflict with someone we question their motives, their character and their relationship with us.

When really, they could just be having an off day.

Or they’re struggling with a problem much larger than ours. They could be too busy thinking about their family falling apart, potentially losing their job, death or illness of someone they love, struggling raising their kids, feeling distant from God, feeling lost, alone and without direction, feeling burnt and betrayed by those who should be loving and caring for them.

The battles people fight every day of their lives are incredibly intense.

And how dare I question someone’s motives, intent, desires and actions without knowing the battle they are facing? Or even more, without being willing to fight alongside them?

Your turn. What comes to mind for you?

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

-Plato