Do you ever feel stuck? Is there anything more maddening than feeling like you have no options. We’ll that is where Rule #3 in Defensive Driving comes into play.
The driving principle here has to do with not boxing yourself in on the road. For example, if there are three lanes going your direction you should choose the middle lane. By doing this, you leave yourself an escape lane both to the right and to the left. If the road has two lanes heading your way, you should choose the right lane because you’d have the left lane and the shoulder to escape to if needed.
In life and ministry, we never know what might come our way that would cause us to realize that we need to be in a different “lane”. We may have planned well and mapped out our course perfectly (in our minds) and then find out that we had not considered everything. If we’re bull headed and insecure, we’ll just keep on keeping on in our lane not admitting we need to make a change. This will lead to two things at the end. First, you will not accomplish what you set out to do and second, you’ll lose the respect of the team you lead.
At NewSpring, our production team has decided to enjoy the process and not focus on the end result. We put a lot of effort into our service order and service elements (music, videos, stage props, lighting, ect…). Very talented people invest their time and energy into creating great content that we all plan for in our creative team meetings. At times, however, we’ll get down the road of that preparation and realize that what we had planned really doesn’t get us to where we want to be… so we’ll drop that element… even on a Sunday morning when it has been completed and is ready to go.
If you have ever experienced this type of thing, it can be very frustrating when you place all your emotions and value in that element actually making it into the service. It is easy to think, “Why did I even try and why did I waste all this time?” An understandable demeanor but one that will box you in and cause you to quickly lose your passion.
In the future I’ll spend sometime discussing falling in love with the process and not the end result. For now, though, I would encourage us all to not place all our eggs in the basket of accomplishment and realize that there will always be more to this life than that.
As a leader, I must leave myself an out when it comes to making changes… even last minute ones.
