Cause to Pause

Ever get a volunteer, give ‘em some direction, then when an “oops” happens the volunteer blames themself for messing up and you blame yourself for not training them right?
Yeah. Me neither.
But the real question comes in “What was the goal?”
Ok, for just a minute, get down off the “Ten Leadership Principles of Successful Team Development Through Personal Excellence” train and remember that the most important word is “personal”. The only thing that really matters is people. We are all just dealing with people. Shoot, some of even are people!
If you have read this blog for any length of time (and I thank the both of you), you know I have a slant toward expectations. Giving and getting. But sometimes, maybe, just sometimes it isn’t about fulfilling expectations. Maybe sometimes it is just about “being”.

For the last six weeks my small group and I have been wading through the book of Galatians. The whole book is about grace verses law. Living a life led by the Spirit verses living one of fulfilling expectations that are beyond reach. This letter is unlike any of Paul’s other ones. This isn’t Paul the “hang in there guys, I believe in you, me and my buddies all say ‘Hi’, let’s have lunch, buh-bye”.
This Paul the Angry Blogger.
What is he so honked off about? Somebody has been trying to get the Galatians to start worrying about fulfilling expectations that they have no business even thinking about. And once they got on the “expectation fulfillment train”, there was no stopping it. Their focus shifted from one of gratitude and “glad that is over” to one of…well…..OUCH!

I don’t have any great axiom to close this post out and tie those two points up with a bow. It all seems incongruous on the surface.
But I will say that you know how you really didn’t care about that little “oops” I mentioned? Your volunteer probably didn’t care about being undertrained either. Probably never entered their mind.
But if either one of you lets the other start down the “should have done…” road, you are both in trouble. You are BOTH putting yourself under a burden that really doesn’t exist. That’s a line of thinking that certainly won’t end at ” love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control”.

I saw this post from Christopher Dawsonover at ZDNET:

“Just a brief rant here, folks…I talked a while ago about my superintendent and how he used AOL extensively for calendaring and communication. Basically, I came to the conclusion that if we don’t provide users with a range of tools to satisfy their needs, they’ll bring crappy ones on-site that we’ll need to support (like AOL).”

Now there is a little bit of wisdom! One of the challenges we face in church data is “silos of information”. People maintaining their Excel sheets, Outlook contact lists, etc outside of the main database. This became a topic of discussion at the FL.CITRT during the session on IT Strategy.

One of the axioms I picked up over 10 years ago from Calvary Chapel, Ft. Lauderdale was that their entire method of ministry had been boiled down to:
“Find a need and fill it.”

The same applies to internal tools: listen to needs, prove the tools, maintain ongoing dialog, be willing to set aside pride and the “I am right, you WILL do it MY way” type of thinking.

It is either that or fractured ministry, silos of information, frustrated staff on both sides and burned out volunteers.

Comcast made it out yesterday to look at our “part time help”  internet. It still dropped off every morning around 6am for a few seconds. This past Sunday was the worst. Wouldn’t stay up for more than a 30 seconds and this lasted until we gave up to go to church. They ran some tests. Found some “readings that were out of range”.
The guys came out, turns out there was corrosion in the connections at the street and elsewhere. Today I am getting an average of 10 and change mb down and 3mb up according to Speakeasy.net. I’ll take it.
I do hope this fixes it and they have us listed as customers in the system now. Sunday morning I talked to six people in two states and only one of them had any record of us as customers. It was pretty frustrating.

Last month they took the service over from our HOA. On the appointed day, our cable cut off. I tweeted “Cable down. Comcast must be making the switch.” Within 30 minutes I got a tweet back from someone at Comcast asking if they could look into it for me. Cool. I tried that again when customer service acted like I was John Locke.
Nothing. Which tells me that some companies monitor twitter traffic sometimes. But don’t count on it helping you to get to the front of the line.

Post edit:
49 minutes after the original post, I received a tweet from Frank Eliason asking to look into the trouble.
Approximately an hour after that, they posted a comment on this blog with contact info.
My wife also mentioned that the Comcast rep who came out was the best service tech we have had. Bar none.