Tag: needverse

236 – Leading as Teachers

Everyone is at a different learning level, even within the same grade. The duty and responsibility of a teacher is to recognize these differences and accommodate each student.

Not all students are formal. In fact, most of the “students” you will “teach” might never cross your mind as students until decades later, if at all. The person on the street asking for directions, the man at the airport fumbling with his papers because he doesn’t know the system, the young cashier who can’t figure out why you gave $11 when the bill is only $6 and tries to give you the extra dollar bill back before making change .. everyone of these people is your student for the moment. Don’t let them know that you’re their teacher, just be kind and make sure they learn without knowing they did. Act a little dazed, if you must, just make sure they can figure it out.

My grandfather was wonderful at many things, except teaching how to tie shoes. He did it so fast that none of the grandchildren could understand. His sons would laugh while his daughters smiled and demonstrated how its done. He would have made a terrible flight attendant demonstrating pre-flight safety. All teaching material must be graded and understandable.

Everyone must learn everything we know. If you struggle with patience while other people are learning, it could be that you have not continued learning yourself; it could also be that you have not taken enough time to pause and teach others along your journey.

There are three main learning methods; we each have a forte: touch, sight, and sound. Some students need to have “experience” or “mass” in order to understand a concept. Multiplication tables might be easier with groups of legos just as government paperwork might make more sense if it is grouped with paperclips and stacked in order of processing.

Know the levels and styles of learning. Keep an ongoing self-awareness of your own increments of learning. The steps of learning are very, very small. They seem much bigger going through them than looking back. Remember what it was like. When you read about Jesus, remember that he is the best teacher who lived.

235 – Excellence in Craft

The work we do is a reflection of who we are as the Image of God the Creator. In being careful and thoughtful in whatever you make or whatever service you perform, you are demonstrating the good character traits of a Divine Image. Angels will watch what you do in order to understand God; even though they have known Him for thousands of years, they will learn more about Him by watching humans perform tasks with excellence. Even when we are not careful, animals see our craft and know that we do things they never could. When we do whatever we do with excellence and care, we bring justice to the world around us.

No one died because bridges were made too well or because paper held it’s form. While wicked men exploit tools for wickedness, their wickedness would continue without quality work. But, if the bridge holds, then people can cross in safety and we can come to the rescue of people who have no hope. If paper holds its form, messages and ideas can make their ways through the world, helping humanity to understand each other and progress.

When you don’t do a good job, you create cleanup work for others, thus taxing their time when they have done nothing wrong. Such is not the justice of God. Having your work finished properly, well-assembled, robust, and suited for its purpose, other people can focus on their own tasks and needs, having their work been helped by whatever part you finished well.

No matter how insignificant or boring, your work explains God and dispenses justice to everything around you. Work and effort are like a shining light, but traveling through the presence of tools and pathways rather than through photons.

Rightly so, God will judge every one of us for how we perform our work much more than whatever work it is that we do. If you drive a car, drive it with skill, speed, safety, and respect for other drivers on the road. If you clean toilets, minister to every visitor of the lavatory by granting them the cleanliness of Heaven. If you govern, help the efforts of the skilled people you serve.

233 – Planning, Preparation, Habits & Flexibility

Things in life get done through four main ways: planning, preparation, habit, and the flexibility to live with spontaneity. Habits train our autopilot, governing things we do even without trying. They build skills and knowledge over time, seemingly without effort. Preparation is about meeting prerequisites, being diligent with due diligence, completing the reading before the meeting, and finishing the homework before getting to class. Planning is about scheduling and plotting out times and events.

God governs over us, dominating, ruling, sitting above us, by keeping all these different methods necessary. We must learn all of these different ways of working to have the best in life. Of all these ways to get things done, nothing gets done if it doesn’t happen. Actually doing something—taking initiative, getting off the couch, keeping commitments, steering priorities—the action of “doing” a thing is what delivers its results.

A pastor in Cabrini Green explained this to me, “That lady was supposed to meet me today, but she can’t because she had to go to the store. Going to the store only takes one or two hours. But, in ‘poverty’ mentality, a person doesn’t understand the idea of going to the store and keeping an appointment in the same day. That’s part of what keeps poor people poor.”

Planning and intentionally preparing allow greater and better things to get done. Anyone can write a good story or build a good house. But, an awesome story requires some outlining and probably a backstory for the author’s reference. An excellent house requires excellent structures, skills, and materials—and those things don’t happen by accident. Excellent buildings must be coordinated, which is why construction scheduling is literally an academic study all to itself. Habits keep us working when we don’t think about working. Yet, there are always those moments that come by without warning and, when they do, we must seize the unplanned, one-time opportunity or miss out forever.

Different things get done different ways. But, nothing gets done unless it gets done. Hard work will achieve more than a well-planned calendar full of “excused absences”. The “doing” is the common thread of many types of paths that life opens for us.

232 – Leading as Sons Who Love Fathers

In Heaven, there will be no younger and older generations, only one people where all are brothers and sisters without aged bodies. When confronting the normal frustration with any older or younger generation, it can help to envision others at your own age and also to envision yourself at their age. But, there is much more that can also be done to strengthen intergenerational friendship.

At times, your elders will look to you for leadership—especially when they contend with you. When an older person fights with you as if they were your peer in age, they are unwittingly sending the message that they think they are immature and need leadership from you. Don’t object, give them that leadership. Instantly imagine yourself as the adult in the room and be patient, respectful, and instructive as you must be with anyone younger than yourself.

Even when not acting younger than their age, older generations always appreciate leadership from younger generations. Be worthy of this respect. Be kind and tender, don’t act like people can take your wrath merely because they have more gray hair. You, be the leader, clean up their generational trash left behind. Be gentle as a servant with the authority of a butler to have any guest helped or removed from the house. Don’t be cold or uncaring when you are required to lay down the law.

Hopefully, people in the older generation have leadership to provide you. If so, accept it, be respectful, and act like you thoroughly understand that you are under their oversight without complaint. Thank them, be cooperative, follow procedures, and give them honor worthy of a king.

Of course, always learn from everyone and anyone in any situation. Whether you need to be the adult in the room, the child in the room, or if everyone is mature enough to act timelessly and agelessly—learn from the older generation’s wisdom. Even when you have innovative insight that will help, your innovation must be coupled with wisdom. Even when an older man is wrong, he knows elements of history, so listen to his explanation for his opinion. You will be there one day, make the journey painless as possible.

231 – Mind Your Own Morals

Neither Job nor his friends had much Bible background to go on. Based on what little knowledge the Book of Job demonstrates about God, Job’s main source of information about God was the Book of Enoch, where he heard about God in the heavens with the “hearing of the ears”, but had never seen God Himself. Abraham likely learned “righteousness” from Job’s example.

Job knew what it meant to be a “righteous man” and he sought to be “righteous” himself. But, until Elihu rebuked Job and his friends, and until God showed up, neither Job nor his friends understood from personal encounter. Throughout most of the book, Job and his friends develop their own self-made ideas about why God does what He does and, of course they accuse Job. Job’s error was his indignation. Job’s friends’ error was their accusation against Job, becoming “accusing satans” themselves. The truth they all missed was their need for guidance from above.

People may try to impose their self-made moral code onto you—partially dismissing morals from above, partially imposing their contrived morals, always accusing you of both intolerance and immorality. Don’t join them. Don’t help them. Speak up, represent yourself, don’t quietly agree to be agreeable.

If others want a moral code for themselves, that’s their business, their choice, their results, and their prerogative; but so is your choice of a moral code.

One of the most shameless impositions of proven-to-fail, man-made morals is the outlawing of basic spanking to discipline children, yet at the same time spending public funds on government programs to help children behave better when they grow up. Another imposition is the social taboo of being naked for simple bathing purposes in public bathhouses, but encouraging evermore sexual encounters with multiple people under the mask of “liberation”. Spanking is not abuse and being naked with like kind is not strange, but as societies confuse and reverse these, crime increases, immorality and related diseases spread, and birthrates decline.

You don’t need to criticize the evident results of self-made morals, but you don’t need to hail them either. Job prayed for his friends who criticized him with their self-made standards. Follow his example as Abraham did.

229 – Fidelity

The way to hire quickly and be a fast judge of character is to have fidelity yourself and thus quickly identify whether other people live with fidelity or with conflicting values and morals. You cannot recognize fidelity in others unless you have it yourself. You cannot have fidelity yourself unless you treasure it in others.

People are made if the same stuff all the way through. If a person can live in conflict with his own values then he can also live in conflict with yours and your company’s. Morals are a fast way to where where someone stands. Where fidelity is concerned, there are two types of people: the deviant who maintains internal moral conflict and the immature who seeks to expunge as many internal moral conflicts as possible. No one is perfect, but some of us want to be.

If you want to be perfect then you will run well with those who also want to be. But, if your coworker, supervisor, or employee is hiding some secret, ongoing scandal—and thinks that scandal is not immoral—then you are bound to have “teamwork” and “compatibility” issues when you work together; and you might never figure out why.

Just because we travel in the same ramp lanes on an expressway cloverleaf doesn’t mean we share the same destination. One might be merging on and the other merging off. Know where you are going, be honest with yourself about where you are going, then you will easily recognize whether other people know where they are going and are honest with themselves about where they are going.

Someone who is actually going where he thinks he is going is a rare person indeed—rare enough that he just might be the kind if person someone like you can work with. Don’t be like Samson who kept flirting with Delilah as she tried again and again to make him weak, vexing his heart until he let her take away his power. Had he been honest about where his foolish heart was taking him, he would have saved himself years of pain and would likely have lengthened his life. Know where your path leads, then lead others.

228 – Leading as Fathers Who Love Sons

I write not about biological, 24/7 fathers. Parenting around the clock is an experience to itself. I write about love, respect, and care for any younger generation.

Older and younger generations feel a tension. The older we get, the more we become who we are at our core. Some become better, many become worse. There is more to leading than grumbling about youth doing things that youth do. There’s more to growing up than spiting one’s own behavior merely for being young.

People in younger generations need space. Sometimes it makes no sense, but it is necessary. Resistance comes from younger people softly, but it must be heeded. Even when a young person misunderstands the older, he must figure out basic rules of concluding and communication on his own. There’s enough advice in this world to know not to hold a grudge about an unconfirmed offense. If a lad or lass needs to wander off and fret about a big nothing, just let it be.

There are steps that can be taken to approach and invite friendships, just tread softly and happily and don’t impose yourself. Drip ideas, lay down the law if it is your place, but check your condescending tone at the door. Youth under punishment rarely want an explanation, but one or two good sentences will give them enough to chew on to make it educational. When they come slinking back, don’t push them away.

And, for Heaven’s sake, don’t hold a grudge against someone younger than you. Grow up and at least pretend to be an adult. Adults don’t quibble with children.

Care, concern, value, respect—whether you harbor these virtues toward the younger generation, your true colors will show when you face each other’s differences. Elders have wisdom, youth have innovation and energy. God put us together and He wasn’t a fool in doing so; the old man complaining about the youth is the fool because he implies his own failed leadership.

Provide, govern softly, lay infrastructure, encourage, drip nuggets of teaching that help interpret the moment, and give space when quietly signaled to. Be the one initiate patient understanding. Maintain love and give respect to everyone younger than you.