I took a Cartel Course on communications strategies to learn that I don’t really have one.

I send out a weekly e-newsletter. That’s my strategy. That strategy costs me $40 per month, which is used to not. I’m pretty sure that’s money badly spent.

The course made me identify different groups I want to communicate with and how. Students, parents, and volunteer leaders can’t all be served by a single weekly e-newsletter. Honestly, my communications habits have focused primarily, if not exclusively, on parents. I do almost no communicating with students. Not with social media. Not with texting. A little with email, if initiated by a student.

My volunteers get a weekly email from me most of the time with materials for the week’s youth groups, but it’s not always timely or consistent.

Time to level up the communications game. In addition to the weekly e-newsletter, I need to mix in a monthly newsletter for parents, and my weekly emails to volunteer leaders need put on a schedule. Some communication piece for students needs developing.

 

Communication that isn’t deliberate and disciplined frustrates everyone, including me.

 

You’re never really missing out, are you? As long as you’re here and have some measure of agency and choice, you’re in. You get to decide what the game is.

Who’s to say the thing you’re afraid of missing out on shouldn’t worry about missing out on you? Maybe FOMO has it backwards.

 

I lost myself in an organizational chart yesterday afternoon. It was bliss: three hours of creating and moving boxes representing work and people, configuring them this way and that. It could easily have gone on for another three hours.

An org chart feels like an exercise in idealism, even escapism. Pressed by projects and tasks in the weekly march of ministry work, indulging in an entire afternoon of drawing those projects in boxes, color coding them and moving them around, is oddly relaxing. Suddenly you see where the thing you’re working on right now fits in a larger labyrinth. And you exhale.

But where in the org chart is the new work that nobody is doing yet but that, if you’re paying attention, could and should be part of your ministry within the next six to 12 months? If everything in the chart is spoken for, and all the peoples’ plates are full, how will you experiment with anything?

How do you plot experimentation on an org chart?

You’re up earlier than you need to be so that you can arrive earlier than anyone else and get in an hour or two of extra practice, extra work. This is drive and determination, this is the desire to get ahead, or, at least, not fall behind. This is how you make an impact.

But do you have metrics for enough? When the right amount of impact is made, will you know it? And if you know it, will you still sleep less and push more?

Maybe you’re trying to make an impact, or maybe you’re outrunning the fear that you’re not the impact-making type and that today is the day everyone will realize it. You can’t sustain good work and ministry–much less health–that way.

Decide what counts as enough. Then stop.

I always sleep terribly the night before the spring time change. I sleep a fitful sleep full of nightmares about sleeping too late. But no worry this year: I had a plan to trick my alarm clock. It was brilliantly analog.

Here it is: since the phone is the alarm clock, switch it into airplane mode before midnight and set the alarm for one hour earlier than you actually want. If you want to get up at 5:00, set the alarm for 4:00. Since, in daylight savings-adjusted time, 4:00 is actually 5:00, you’re good. Mass chronology tracking shenanigans: defeated.

Only somehow the phone clock changed on its own anyway, even with all the networks switched off. Which means that the alarm went off at a pre-daylight savings time of 3:00.

Digital wins again. I tried to analog outsmart the time change and got digitally punched in the face.

Jesus knows a lot. He knows things other people don’t know, even about themselves. He knows things about himself–where he’s from and where he’s going.

Maybe one of the keys to understanding the foot-washing episode that unfolds in John chapter 13 is Jesus’ self-understanding. As that story begins, John tells us that Jesus, “knowing . . . that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table . . .” All the action that follows is grounded in what Jesus knows to be true about himself.

John is at pains to portray the action: Jesus getting up from the table; Jesus laying aside his robe; Jesus taking a towel; Jesus tying the towel around his waist; Jesus filling a basin with water. Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. We are meant to marvel at the deliberate movement of one who knows what he is doing because he knows who he is because he knows where he’s come from and because he knows where he’s going.

When we know where we come from and where we’re going, we can do a lot. The greatest feats of humility and service are possible when we are freed from the chore of performing our identity for the world and when we are permitted to just be who we know ourselves made to be. We are children of God, made in God’s image. We are going to God. Our lives are pointed in that direction.

Jesus’ instructions to imitate his humble service are possible when we own those truths about ourselves.

Jesus’ inability to be surprised is a bit of a hurdle for me. I’m working on a sermon about the foot washing episode in John 13, where the author insists on telling the reader the things Jesus knows that the disciples in the story don’t. Each time the story does that my heart sinks a little. I kind of want to see Jesus surprised.

All the gospels give away that their Galilean subject knows things normal people don’t, like what people are thinking before they say it and the true intentions behind peoples’ gotcha questions. John does it the most, though.

Jesus knew that the hour had come. Jesus knew who was going to betray him. It’s not the plausability of it that gets me; the objection that he couldn’t possibly know those things seems hung up on the wrong element. It’s the drama of it that gets hurt when we’re told as an aside that Jesus knows the ending already.it sucks the tension right out of everything. 

This is another reminder that the gospel is the gospel. It’s not some prototype of a story onto which we can project our own literary or critical conventions to make it do what stories are “supposed” to do.

Kiddo went to a new gymnastics class yesterday at a legit gym that has bars and rings and the whole bit. She’s been cartwheeling and handstanding all over the house for six months, stopping only long enough to watch YouTube tutorials and floor routines. 

Yesterday her course of self-teaching met it’s first real obstacle: the push up. 

The coach put Kiddo and her classmates through a circuit of gymnastics skills AND strength exercises, and Kiddo strained and struggled. 

Though I know literally nothing about the sport, gymnastics seems to rely on both complicated technical skills AND Herculean physical strength. One of those attributes without the other does not a gymnast make. 

The same goes for all kinds of meaningful work. Impressive skills are supported by core strengths. The gifted orator practices reading. The in-demand designer works on listening. The effective teacher prefects her diction. 

Push ups. 

What’s your push up? 

I’m getting my game document in good working order. Fresh off a weekend youth retreat where this bad boy was ever at my side, I can say that the time it takes to assemble and maintain a collection of games for youth ministry is time we’ll spent. Nothing brings a group of teenagers together quite like a simple, thoughtful, well-led game. 

Of course, as with any vital resource, 100 % of my games are pilfered from other sources.. There’s people I actually work with. There’s this classic blog post and this YouTube channel, and then there are those old Youth Specialties games books. 

Anyone who says they invented a game should be regarded with suspicion. 
For my money, the best games require few or no supplies. They don’t progressively eliminate people but encourage constant participation by the whole group. They don’t rely on embarrassing people. 

I update this document constantly, and I take a copy with me on every retreat. 

What’s your go-to game source? 

I threw in these 15 minute prompted journaling time blocks for this weekend’s Confirmation retreat. The prompts all related to Brian McLaren’s appendix and built toward a Statement of Faith all the students would be writing. 

I expected resistance. 

It did not come. 

Instead, students asked during the retreat evaluation session for more of that journaling time and less of the grown-ups-talking-at-us time. I will gladly oblige that request (I will not, however, oblige the evaluation request for more Hamilton sing-along time).

Here’s the assignment we used to guide the student’s journaling and faith statement writing. Is it too vague for 8th graders? Too abstract? It seemed to work well enough this first run, but I’m always tweaking, you know.