Category / Work

by Michael

Personal Vocational Values

Yulee Lee, our pastor to children and youth at New Community in Logan Square, led us through an exercise during our staff meeting last week. She guided us in a discussion about personal vocational values.

Our staff is in the midst of forming as a team for this current ministry season. Having added our newest leader a few months ago, we are thinking about developing a team or group culture as pastors at the Logan Square church. This is an area where we’ve experienced a fair amount of change over the almost 11 years I’ve been at the church. Because the group has been different over those years, it feels like a new moment. It certainly is a new group of us since January.

Our emphasis has me thinking through how personal values meets the work of a group. It seems that a person is always bringing himself or herself to a group. The question is usually one of degree. How much am I in this room? How much of me is known by this group? Who am I to this circle? What have I shared and what have I withheld? These are some of the questions during group process. I’m grateful that our congregation’s pastors are engaging with some of them.

by Michael

Finishing Courses

Semesters have always been natural endings for me as an adult. I’ve been impacted by academic calendars a lot in my life since college. As a student and teacher, finishing a course has been a normal way for me to reflect, consider, and plan for change.

I just ended a unit with students in clinical pastoral education. And I’m finishing a semester/year with my students at GETS in another week. I’m looking forward to an intensive course at NPTS that’ll happen in June. As some things close, I’m thinking about the things that we do as learners when we finish courses. Here are helpful questions worth sitting with when the course finishes:

  1. What did I do that I loved?
  2. How did I learn?
  3. Who will I be now that this is done?
  4. What does my spent energy say about my passions?
  5. Where can I do better?
by Michael

Your Sabbatical

I was thinking about your sabbatical and this came to mind. It from Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out:

We often are very, very busy, and usually very tired as a result, but we should ask ourselves how much of our reading and talking, visiting and lobbying, lecturing and writing, is more part of an impulsive reaction to the changing demands of our surroundings than an action that was born out of our own center. We probably shall never reach the moment of a “pure action,” and it even can be questioned how realistic or healthy it is to make that our goal. But it seems of great importance to know with an experiential knowledge the difference between an action that is triggered by a change in the surrounding scene and an action that has ripened in our hearts through careful listening to the world in which we live…a response that is really our own. In solitude we can pay careful attention to the world and search for an honest response.

 

by Michael

Giving & Receiving Hugs

I approached her the way I would anyone in her situation. Softly. Gently. Quietly. My head was bowed. It was a form of what I’ve explained to my wife is my chaplain walk.

The woman was crying. It’s not all she was doing but crying sums it up. More broadly she was at the side of her dead father. I had already been with him. Now, I got to meet his daughter and stand with her to witness life once father is gone.

I came to her side. I asked her if I could touch her shoulder. I did so, recognizing the tender permission you give to a stranger you realize is only there for you. You may never see him again. You may never have to explain yourself. You may never have to re-live that moment. So you say yes with a shrug that can be interpreted as a grief heave, even though it’s the answer to his question.

My hand was on her and at some point, she turned to me. She asked me if I could hug her. My arms were already open. That opening was not planned, though it was intentional somewhere in my soul. My posture knew what it meant to be there, knew those tears. I knew something about that woman’s grief. And we both gave and received each other’s hugs.

by Michael

Cues to Connect

I learned of a dear teacher’s upcoming retirement recently. I thought of a conversation with someone over the weekend when we spoke admiringly of a different teacher’s impact upon my life. I’ve been sitting with those and other teachers in my spirit. I’ve been thinking of them in my mind, talking to them and telling them how much they’ve meant to me.

As a rule, I don’t keep such secrets. I’ve told these folks before how they’ve influenced me. Sometimes I’ll even write an email or make a call when someone has passed my mind more than twice. Teachers and non-teachers, if I’ve thought of a person multiple times, I take it as a cue to connect.

Perhaps someone has passed your mind, passed your vision. Send them something. Reach out. Take the cue.

by Michael

On-The-Job Training

Last month and this month Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks sat before respective Senate committees for interviews. It occurred to me that I’ve assumed that certain qualifications attach themselves to certain roles. I’ve thought this way about pastors and leaders in churches, hospitals, and graduate schools. These are the places where I spend my time, where I work. But I also believe that when it comes to other roles.

I realized as I turned off the news that I think there is massive room for growth any time a person takes a position. But, at the same time, there are some lessons that should be learned before accepting a role. There are some things you really should know. There are some classes one should have mastered before surrendering to a leading place of those same classrooms.

I believe in the experience of on-the-job training. I’ve lived it. For instance, I wasn’t an executive pastor before Sweet Holy Spirit made me one. I had no concept for restructuring loans and managing payroll and developing oversight committees from the membership for the health of that church. While providing pastoral care and teaching formation. While standing in when the pastor traveled 50% of the week. While maturing as a very young adult.

Sweet Holy Spirit, the context, cast those particular needs into view and called those new learnings forth from me. But I had completed graduate school. I had been in seminary while working there. I had been the closest student of the senior pastor for most of my remembered life. I had been through experiences that set me up to live with integrity in that learning and serving environment.

I wasn’t brand new. I was continuing in my on-the-job training after having been trained in other spheres. It’s true that where we’ve been stations us for what we’re doing and for where we’re headed. But when we take roles that are out of step with “where we’re headed,” the path is destructive; the process is painful; and the product is usually whatever you imagine as bad.

by Michael

Questions and Comments

I prefer questions to comments. I’ve always had this preference.

Questions entice me, interest me, and get me engaged. Comments bore me.

When I’m with someone who’s a clear comment person, it takes a lot of work to stay with them. And even when I try, I find it easier to leave them, to disengage, to go elsewhere mentally.

If there is a question on the table, there’s something I can focus on, something I can turn to, something that is, by it’s nature, agitating a part of me.

There’s nothing wrong with being a comments person. It’s just that I’m a questions person. I’m closer to people when questions are involved. I’m more distant when things are simply said.

We’re different and it’s worth knowing as much as possible where we fall along such life lines.