I discovered Clippings.io yesterday from this blog post by James Clear. He’s a big advocate of keeping notes on all your reading and making those notes searchable, which is why he uses Clippings to import all of his Kindle notes and highlights into Evernote. Whoah.

I’m not an Evernote user. When I have to use a note taking app, Google Keep is simple enough. I jot down a few groceries or type out a quick customer service reference number, but that’s it.  But I’ve been reading on a Kindle for almost 10 years now, highlighting and notating incessantly, so I couldn’t resist the urge to see it all in one place.

I opened accounts in both Clippings and Evernote (Clippings cost $1.99 per month). Then I watched as my brand new Evernote account populated itself with hundreds of passages from every Kindle book I’ve ever read. Critically, that included the notes I took on a book I’m teaching for the next two weeks but haven’t read in two years.

Keep reading. Keep highlighting. Keep typing out notes on your Kindle or scribbling them in the margins then typing them up later. The compilation your building is worth something.

There was a line in yesterday’s sermon that was more flourish than it was substance, which I readily admit. Sermons need flourish.

Effective work has flourish.

Flourish should not be the thing they remember about what you did, though. It should light up the substance. Here’s a good rule of thumb. If the moment of flourish is the thing about your work you’re most proud of, cut it.

Flourish is a means to an end, not an end itself.

This morning I preach at the 8:00 service. I have never published the text of a sermon on this blog before. It’s “Show Your Work Sunday,” though, so here’s a draft. It may yet be revised before I preach it in three hours. The 18 point arrangement of the Scripture reading is at the top.

It clocks in at just over 1900 words and follows much more of a verse-by-verse structure that I’m used to doing.

I also designed a discussion guide for our Confirmation class small groups on the Holy Spirit. Since a friend urged me to simplify my lesson writing by using the Hook, Book, Look, Took template I’ve been doing that and finding it effective.

Anthony Bourdain judges people for being late. “Today, you’re just late, but eventually you will betray me” (the feature on Bourdain by Patrick Radden Keefe in this week’s New Yorker is worth savoring). 

His judgmental punctuality strikes a chord with me these days, because five times a week I heap mounds of judgment–some silent, some not silent–on my eight year-old for her complete disregard for the clock. I stand by the door holding her coat and lunchbox, ominously warning, “School starts in five minutes,” and she retorts, “So?” I lose it. I threaten to take away her iPod. I look out the window and report that all the other kids are already gone. Once, when whe was in preschool, I staged a fake phone call to her teacher reporting that Laura was going to be late and so they should just start playtime without her. 

Why do I invest so much character assessment in peoples’ ability to be on time?

“If you’re five minutes early you’re five minutes late,” is what my high school baseball coach used to warn. You could tell the truly dedicated players, then–the ones who arrived 10, 15, even 30 minutes before practice and began throwing or hitting off the tee. So I started doing that. I soon noticed that early arrivers were not the starters. The star pitcher showed up on the hour. Getting in 30 minutes of pre-practice work was necessary for some of us, both as a self-improvement strategy and as a demonstration of our desire and commitment to the coach. 

So it’s his voice I hear in my head whenever I’m running late (I judge no one’s tardiness more harshly than my own). That suggests to me that the lasting influence of our interactions with teenagers may not be the program we’re designing but the one we’re running without thinking. This cat couldn’t make me a better baseball player in four years, but he could–and, it seems, did–make me a judgmental, time-obsessed maniac for the next 20. 

A lot of pastor work is project work: plan a retreat, prepare weekly worship, orchestrate a capital campaign, craft a safe child policy, and so on (A lot of pastor work, mostly the care part of the vocation, is decidedly un-project like, too). Projects are made up of tasks.

You can Get Things Done by keeping a master list of your projects in your Bullet Journal, where you also record notes and track task progress toward their achievement. This has been my system for about five years now.

But a vocation is more than a project list. It is a calling, a mission of pursuing Great Ends like, for Presbyterians, exhibiting the Kingdom of Heaven to the world and proclaiming the gospel. Every project on our list ought to align with a great end of our mission.

In between great ends and projects, though, there is something else: buckets. A great end like “eliminating homelessness” does not lead automatically to a project like “organize a bake sale fundraiser.” The project fits in a bucket of work that contributes to achieving the mission. In the case of this example, it’s a fundraising bucket. Eliminating homelessness requires the raising of money, and a bake sale is just one project in that bucket.

Great ends are job-specific, probably the first sentence of your job description. Here’s mine: “planning, coordinating and implementing ministry programs that focus on the spiritual care and faith exploration for youth in grades 6-12.” There’s a bunch of buckets in there, from recruiting and developing volunteer leaders to leading mission trips and retreats. There are projects swirling around each bucket: plan this year’s spring Confirmation retreat; write bulletin and website literature describing opportunities to volunteer with youth.

We need to get clear on our buckets. If we’re not paying attention, the buckets we’re most comfortable working from will be empty, while the ones we’re less confident with will be spilling over with neglected work.

Which bucket are you pulling from today?

A young family made it to Chicago from Aleppo, Syria, after years of terror and flight and, surely, despair. Lawyers and non-profits and churches and a mommy group all played a role.

The law is resilient. The scene at O’Hare airport when the family arrived was lawyer-heavy. About a dozen rectangular folding tables pushed together in rows at the back of the international arrivals terminal, staffed by lawyers holding signs offering help for anyone whose family had been stopped upon entry. Boxes of takeout purchased for the lawyers by the mommy group were strewn around.

Non-profits are resilient. RefugeeOne has the government contract in Chicago to resettle refugees. They train volunteers to co-sponsor families. They lawyer up. They face down the press. They deal with landlords and employers and schools.

Churches and mommy groups are resilient. The churches know how to do this, I think. Welcoming refugees is in our charter, and the scores of bespectacled, grey haired church ladies darting around the terminal, not holding signs, not gazing at the news cameras, but arranging drivers and welcoming volunteers suggests they’re in this for the long haul.

The mommy group is different. That’s a product of social media almost entirely, and there is no reason for them to voluntarily fight through a refugee resettlement process rather than network and arrange playdates. But they did do that. And they’re only just starting. Many of them (like my spouse) were jolted into action on this by the results of the presidential election, which makes me wonder if the best thing for the civic fabric isn’t for it to be strained and pulled at. That nearly every consequential person in the arrival terminal last night was a woman, many with a child at their heels, makes me believe the President does not know what he hath wrought.

Parents are resilient. The mother and father who arrived last night with their 18 month old are in their early 20’s. I couldn’t help recalling as we waited in the terminal that the last time I saw the inside of the international arrivals terminal at O’Hare was in the spring of 1999, when I was 23 and passing through on my way home to Kansas City after a year of volunteer service abroad. I had only my bags and a sprained ankle, not a toddler. And I was returning home, not fleeing it. Still, that arrival lives in my memory as one of the most stressful and emotional experiences of my life.

The courage and strength of these young parents, one an accountant and the other a literature student, makes me hopeful for them and for the country they now will call home.

Resilience, people. The refugees, mommy groups, churches, non-profits, and law have it in spades. We need all of it we can get right now.

We are relying entirely on a weekly email newsletter to share information with our youth and parents. We have a crack team of communications pros at the church who format it, pulling together various threads that the youth ministry staff post to our Slack channel. The signup for the newsletter is on our website, and the communications team manages it, not me.

For the most part this feels efficient and effective. Not only information about upcoming events, but also actionable signups, celebratory reports, and even prayers and pastoral notes are fed weekly to our community of teens and their parents. It’s one of those more-important-than-I-expected pieces of my weekly workload.

But it’s not perfect.

Last week’s newsletter contained a note in bold that a parent meeting featured on our annual calendar for the coming Sunday was cancelled. That didn’t stop a parent from showing up for it, confused and a little irritated. “But we put it in the newsletter” is no help in that situation. I’d published two conflicting pieces of information, and the newer piece could not out-influence the older.

Maybe the parent meeting announcement should have gone on the Facebook page. A dedicated email about it to all the parents could have helped as well. As much as I like our little weekly publication routine, it’s not sufficient for every element of our ministry that will need communicating.

What communication tools and routines are you using?

 

If you’re the one holding up the line, the stick in the spokes jamming the process, either through inadequate experience or study or attention, be annoyed. Pay more attention. Be better next time.

Once you’re better, though, don’t be satisfied. Clocking along to a step-by-step exercise is not the fish we need you frying. Do your part well enough; don’t be the reason the steps get tripped up. But then get back to work on the steps and the processes of your own design.

For some work, the cost of messing up is just greater than the benefit of doing it really well.

Our 6th-12th graders are creating the order of worship for and then leading every part of the two worship services on Sunday, February 19th. These two sessions and accompanying work sheets, one for Confirmation and one for jr. high, are meant to guide students’ planning. Due to my own poor planning, I am not able to lead either of the sessions, so they are written to be led by our all star team of volunteers.

A Session Planning “Responding To The Word”

A Major Worship Actions Worksheet

A Session Planning “Gathering Around The Word”

 

Tonight our Confirmation students take part in the annual homelessness immersion experience, where they spend about 18 hours navigating streets and shelters with only what they can carry before sleeping on a cold gym floor. It’s an experience unlike anything most have done before, and it’s my first time at it too. I started this call about a week after the homelessness immersion last year, and boy was I glad for that.

This is my last first time in this call, at least with the activities I inherited. I’m going to miss claiming ignorance and deferring to my colleagues who have done these things before.

I’m also going to miss the freedom of not knowing how we’ve always done it, of making it up as I go. I don’t see why that has to entirely stop, to be honest.

Anyway, as you enjoy your Friday night, spare a thought for a group of 8th graders who will be braving the Chicago cold to learn and serve. Spare several more for the men and women they’ll meet, who aren’t choosing this experience but are re-living it every night.