I don’t know about your family, but in my family there’s a little joke that whatever you get in your fortune cookie, you follow it up with “in bed”. It can be kind of inappropriate sometimes, but it’s usually funny.
I wonder if maybe we should add “for salvation” at the end of our theological statements in the same way. Theology is a confusing thing and we’re amazingly adept at sins - especially self justifying ones. So we can say things like “God will do….x…” You know, make your baseball team win the pennant, get you a Milky Way bar, etc. And most of the time what we’re saying is, “I don’t actually want to do any work here, I just want to wish for it and if God shows up, great. If not, I wasn’t going to work for it anyway, so I’m not SUPER disappointed it didn’t happen.”
I see this one happening in church leadership from time to time. We’re just going to wait on God to make a goal or to encourage us to meet our neighbor or whatever…and then when He doesn’t do it, well, not only weren’t we going to work on it, but we’re sort of relieved He didn’t do anything. More time to watch the Kevin Smith He-Man reboot I guess.
But what if we got clear on God’s primary concern being our salvation from a sin sick world? Don’t get me wrong, God is interested in all of our lives - but He sent His only begotten Son for one reason and one reason alone - for our salvation. So when we pray, perhaps we need to keep in mind His primary goal. In the words of the Lutheran theologian Normal Nagel, “Let the Almighty God do His Almighty Godding.” And that Godding is being concerned with our salvation. And if we do that. If we really believe that we are saved by an Almighty God, then perhaps we’re get to work on the things that are and should be our primary concerns - leaving His primary concerns to Him.
When we talk about leadership, we often mean it in terms of a noun. That person is “a” leader. This may mean that he or she has been elevated into some position of prominence that allows, perhaps even necessitates their leadership.
But we can also talk about leadership as an adjective. Leadership is some quality of certain persons who see the world in a certain way or who have a tendency towards certain behavioral patterns.
Leadership, however, mostly lives in the space of the predicate - a verb and an object. It exists in the willingness to accept responsibility. The Greek word “arche” gets translated sometimes as “leadership”. “Arche” means “first”. A leader goes first. A leader sees first. A leader volunteers first. And that’s how she gets to be a leader. She does.
There is something very haunting about this meme, something that I have wondered about myself on a variety of occasions. I tend to be that person who works, who tries to achieve, who keeps himself and his mind busy. But quite frankly, there are large swaths of moments where I wonder if it is all a piteous coping mechanism for the darkness of my brain’s operations when it is otherwise less occupied. I suppose that means that I continue to work. After all, it is better than the alternative. But I also wonder if that is a defect - an unwillingness, perhaps even to some degree an (at least temporary) inability to Sabbath, to rest, to abide. I’m not sure that I, or perhaps my tribe, will ever really know until the Resurrection.
If you ask most people what the first brand to make a cola soft drink is, they will tell you “Coca Cola”. Coca Cola, or Coke, is the brand that we judge other colas against. Coke tells us what a cola drink is, it makes all colas the same because it was first on the scene and it dominates the definition in our minds of what a cola is. But that “sameness of cola” is exactly what Coke uses to differentiate itself. Coke isn’t every other cola, it is *the* cola. It is the definition when all others are iterations. It is simultaneously the thing that makes other colas the same and the thing that makes other colas different.
Coke gets to do this with colas, but who gets to do it with humans? Who gets to do it with the kind of work that you do? We’re all different and the same. We all have our categories but our own iterations of those categories. But too many of us try to focus on being “the same” too much of the time. The thing that is going to make a cola stand out is that it is able to live in the category of cola only so that it can show how it differentiates itself. What category are you in right now? And how are you bringing something new and different?
14 years ago I began my journey of ordained service to the Church. I have such gratitude for those of you who have allowed me to be a part of your lives through it, and such gratitude to the God who called me into it. Thank you and to Him be all praise, glory, wisdom, thanks, honor, and strength.
Paragraph 5 in your history might contain error--Gamma Delta made up of LCMS students. Side note: my father, Louis F. Rush, served as international president 1945-47. I was just working on our family tree & found your historical info. Thanks for posting that.
Hey! Thanks for reaching out! I appreciate it. I’ll look into the correction here.
I’m someone who has ideas. The Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment has even told me that it’s one of my strengths. “Ideation” they call it. It’s one of those things that just comes up for me. And it’s possible that I’m blind to how difficult this is for other people. I mean, after all, the sense of it being a strength for me gives at least the implication that it’s a weakness for other people.
It’s a pet peeve of mine. I routinely encounter people who want to share with me their “really great idea”. I appreciate the thought that goes into those ideas. I appreciate the idea themselves most of the time. But I don’t trust the person who comes to me with the idea alone.
Ideas alone are not only worthless, they are untrustworthy. Ideas come with work attached to them, they come with briefcase in hand if you will. An idea that doesn’t come to work isn’t an idea, it’s a freeloader, it’s an intruder, it’s something to be skeptical of.
So when someone comes to me with an idea that hasn’t been worked through just a little bit, it usually comes up like this: “I have the silver bullet. If YOU just put in the work, then…” But I don’t put in the work for your ideas. I put in the work for my ideas. And until your idea is my idea, you had better be willing to show me that there’s something (read: your work) that I can trust about your idea.
What are you doing? As the father of a gaggle of kids under 6, I get asked that question pretty regularly. They peer over my shoulder, look at the screen or the paper or the whatever else it is that I’m working on and they ask, “What are you doing?” Because they recognize that what someone does is important. I have conversations with people regularly about what they do because most of the time we feel that what we’re doing is important. It probably is. Especially if we think that it is.
But there’s another question there. A question of being, maybe even a question of becoming. It’s not entirely exclusive of what we’re doing. Doing informs being. Doing tells us if what we’re doing makes sense with who we are, who we want to become. If it doesn’t, we should stop doing that.
This is where the roles are reversed. I see my girls dressed up in crowns and holding little plastic scepters and I ask, “who are you being right now?” And it makes sense. I see what they’re doing, but I need some more information about it. Are they an evil queen? A heroic princess? Who are they being? And does what they are doing make sense with that being?
What are you doing? And who are you being? And does it make sense?
