Some of the youth I know are preparing for Battle of The Bands, and for one of them this is the first time she’s performing in front of people. She loves to play music. She loves the people she plays with. But right now, three weeks out from a three-song set in front of all her peers, she just wishes it was over.

She can’t see any outcome other than the one in which the other bands are all better and the crowd boos them offstage. She’s confident these 10 minutes will prove to everyone that her musical dreams are misplaced and that she’s nothing but a poseur. The misery she’s putting herself through now is as if those things have already happened.

I told her that winning in this case is just getting on stage and shredding. Winning isn’t the cheering crowd. Winning isn’t even the Battle of The Bands crown. In this case, winning is showing up and doing the thing you love while your knees are wobbling and you feel like puking.

#winning.

We don’t get to pick what grows from our acts of personal courage, and I have no doubt that more grows than our dread can imagine. We conjure images of important people disapproving, but I suspect there’s fertile soil in the audience we’re not accounting for, people who live with their own fear and who will take courage from yours, people who need some imperfection and the raw delivery that only the terrified can summon.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Then shred.

The six old pleaded for $1.15 to buy a pink eraser at school because “everybody else” has one and because they’re all making fun of her for not having one.

&%$#.

The details were short. It’s clearly exaggeration, if not emotional manipulation.

But still, &%$#.

Halfway through my life lesson about you-don’t-want-those-kinds-of-people-for-friends it occurred to me that she doesn’t really have a choice. When you’re in first grade, you have no control over your environment, and all those things that grown ups chalk up to kids being kids dominates your every interaction, and you can’t get away from them.

They can’t get away from you either.

So you want that eraser to win their favor or at least to fend off their jeering, until, of course, the next trinket comes along that you don’t have, when it starts all over again.

Then you give her the money for the eraser.

Just sayin’, parenthood is a mess.

Stephen Pressfield gushes a little bit in The War of Art about screenwriters who have incorporated themselves as companies, so that writing jobs come, for example, to “Joe Smitch, Inc.” instead of to Joe Smith himself. He thinks this is a terrific indicator that a writer has distanced her Self from her Work in a healthy way.

Your Self is you, the person you have to live with and look in the mirror every day, who’s contentment rests upon some brew of fulfilling work, financial security, health, and loving personal relationships. Your Work is your brand. It’s your Thing: what you show the world about the thing that you do.

So what is your brand? What is your Thing? Don’t say, “I’m a Pastor,” or “I’m a Writer,” or “I’m a Teacher.” Instead, describe the contribution to the world that your job title allows you to make but that you would still want to make if all the jobs with that title were gone tomorrow.

“I share the gospel.”

“I help people get healthy.”

“I make music.”

“I uncover the truth.”

Many of us are fortunate to have jobs with titles that permit us to do our Thing, but so many of the job titles that used to define for us who we are and what our Things is are either gone or disappearing that now seems a really good time for us to practice telling the world what our Thing is apart from a job title.

So, You Inc.: what’s your Thing?

In ministry, it’s important to have relationships with colleagues for support. A year into my present call, one of the associate pastors in town called several people she knew to put together an “accountability” group of pastors. We met monthly for a couple of years over lunch for no other reason than to share the victories and defeats of our work.

But it’s also important to have relationships with colleagues for learning. We need a network of peers (not all pastors!) with whom we work on projects, so that we can learn from them and they from us. This article wants you to think of that network as your new mentor.

I can’t tell you how much I have learned from people in this way. I’ve started inventing reasons to collaborate with people just so I can watch them work and incorporate their habits, expertise, and skills into my own work. Tapestry is the most obvious example, but there are more.

When my colleague suggested we rethink our early morning Easter worship service as a community outreach opportunity, I pitched the idea first to the owner of my gym, because he’s a mad entrepreneur who’s really good at community outreach. A partnership with him would allow me to watch him work.

Another one. We’re trying to incorporate some artwork into our Lenten worship series on The Stations of The Cross. It’s the perfect excuse to work with my photographer friend in town. I know that if I buy him a coffee and spell out the idea, he’ll go to work. Sure enough, the wheels are spinning and he’s presenting us with an idea next week.

Learning, getting better, enhancing your skill set and knowledge base: these are perfectly sound reasons to create working collaborations with people in your network, as sound as the stated purpose of the work itself.

Of course, if you don’t have a network, building one is as easy as a single email or phone call to someone who’s work you’ve noticed.

The world is full of imperfect tools. If we insist on perfect tools as a condition for doing work, we will leave a lot of work on the table.

The podcast I’ve started is valuable to me, and it utilizes a bundle of flawed tools, namely online recording and editing software that must frustrate the ears off an audiophile. But it’s what I have, and it does what I need it to do. Plus, the work I put into it compensates for some of the tools’ flaws.

There are lots of tools available to churches to do lots of things, from discerning a new way forward to planning a vacation Bible school, and every single one of those tools is flawed. By all means, let’s make our own tools–better tools that are more responsive to our context, more theologically sound, more flexible.

But if the choice is between using an imperfect instrument and doing nothing. Please let’s use the imperfect instrument.

“We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” (2 Corinthians 4:7)