Remember Dave-isms? Dave was my previous boss & pastor and still current friend. I'm trying to convince him that he needs to hire me as his personal assistant. How great would it be to live 45 minutes from M'town and 2 hours from the rest of my family? Wait, wait, wait. I'm not saying I'd be happy to be 2 hours away from my family, but I'd be so much closer to my Elite Spoons Team. We could go on the road. Win tournaments. Make thousands of dollars. Oh, wait. You can't win thousands of dollars playing Spoons in bars? Dang it! At least I'd be closer to my M'town family.
Anywhoo, this isn't about Spoons. This isn't about M'town. This isn't even about family. This is about new Dave-isms. I've remembered 4 more. See? I knew this man taught me more than I remembered when I blogged about it before.
1. Their emergency is not your emergency.
This might be hard to hear, coming from an employee of a church, but I am not able to drop everything I'm doing and give you whatever you want because you're having an "emergency" in your life....and I use the term "emergency" lightly. When someone unknown to the church arrives at 7:00am on a Sunday morning, asking for gas money to get to Des Moines to see his pregnant wife who is in the hospital right now delivering their fifth baby, I have to wonder....Really? We receive calls daily, D.A.I.L.Y., asking us for money for gas, for food, for rent, for their $600.00 electric bill (how in God's name did your electric bill get to $600.00 dollars??? Mine's $30.00/month and that's with the heat at 70. What is yours set at? 90? AND you're just NOW asking for help????). It isn't hard to develop a jaded and cynical personality. Not that it was hard for me to begin with. I started out with that. I pity those church folks who started out so good and holy and have now, after dealing with these issues, become jaded and cynical, like me. Pity them. I started out that way. Their whole worlds have shattered. But Dave helps with that. Keep in mind, "Their emergency is not your emergency". This absolutely doesn't mean, in a true emergency, I don't drop everything and do what I can. I do. I absolutely do. But in a case where I'm skeptical, I give what I can....That's another Dave-ism:
2. If you take something away, give something back
If I'm unable to offer those folks asking for money, money, then I am able to offer them our alternative to dealing with these situations: An application. This weeds out the phishers and the people in real need. The phishers get pissed off and hang up. The people in real need want an application, fill it out, and generally get assistance...and more. They get real help. They get relationships.
3. What's our DNA?
Oh lordy, I used this last night at a meeting and thought, "Am I doing something wrong because I'm using a phrase from a previous pastor in front of the new pastor?" I didn't care. This has meaning. This has flesh. This means something. Not only are we bombarded by needs for assistance, and rightfully so...We're a CHURCH!....but we're also bombarded by requests for other organizations to promote themselves in our church. Our policy is, we don't promote any single for-profit business. Otherwise, could you imagine what church would be like? I shudder to think. BUT, we do promote non-profit businesses. And if our church members are out in the community, doing "charity", shouldn't we promote it? But imagine what that would be like, if we promoted every single charity, every single person in our congregation was involved in. There would be 500 different promotions....More than 1 each day of the year. Impossible. There would never be any time for actual worship! So, the question we have to ask ourselves is, What is our DNA? Who are we? What is our mission? Does this fit our mission? It isn't a hard question to answer when our DNA is clear. I'm not sure it is anymore.
4. If you're asking for vacation during one of the "church" holidays, you can have it.....but just keep on going.
This is the funniest Dave-ism I have. Oh boy. When I first, first, first started working for the church, the custodians complained that they had never had Christmas Eve off. As a new employee and their supervisor, I told them I would speak to the pastor. The pastor laughed and said, "Sure, they can have it off...and they can have January off and February off and March off!" Duh. It's the busiest church season. No church employee has time off at Christmas. It's the unfortunate (or fortunate, however you look at it) part of working for a church. I personally, love it. It's pretty rare my family holiday actually falls on the holiday and if it does, so what? Christmas Day is Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is something entirely different. And what a great time to be with my church family. BUT, Christmas, this year, falls on a Saturday, my day off. So I get an additional day off at some point, before the end of the year. New Year's Day falls on a Saturday, my day off. So I get another day off. I was going to take the Monday after Christmas off. I have Thursday off as my normal day off. And I was going to take Friday the 31st off as my "holiday". I thought, "How stupid to work Sunday, Tuesday & Wednesday that week. I might as well take the whole week off." But I thought of Dave. Being as it's after the holiday, I didn't feel bad about the request. The week after Christmas is always dead as doornails and I always remark to our (new) custodian, "Why the heck didn't I take this week off?" so I don't see any problem, but I kept Dave's Dave-ism in mind. I don't want to cause any other staff person undue stress. But I did make the request.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment