By the Rev. Elena Larssen
Urgent: thefreedictionary.com adjective
a. crucial, desperate, pressing, great, important, crying, critical, immediate, acute, grave, instant, compelling, imperative, top-priority, now or never, exigent, not to be delayed; b. Antonymns: minor, trivial, unimportant, low-priority, casual, apathetic, lackadaisical, weak, feeble, perfunctory, half-hearted
I am not patient. Waiting in lines drives me nuts. I will schedule my entire day to avoid sitting in traffic. Waiting for things like Christmas or birthdays isn’t bad, but I have to work to muster a mature, adult attitude about things like long speeches, unending meetings and pontification. I know that patience is a gift of the Spirit, a personality trait that comes from God. I just happen to know that it’s one that I lack, pretty completely.This wouldn’t be such a problem if I didn’t work in the church. In another walk of life, I could rush from meeting to meeting, eat sushi while driving, start meetings precisely on time, and aim always to end early. In the church, though, it’s frequently so countercultural that I end up being rude, breaking tacit rules about operating on “God’s time” … or at least that’s what we say. I wonder if we say we are working on God’s time to justify our own paralyzing fears about facing the difficult times in which we live.
As leaders, whenever we roll up our sleeves to tackle a task we almost always begin by trying to fix what is broken. That seems to be the most obvious starting point, and the most demanding. This first secret of progressive leadership is an invitation to try another approach. Oh, the challenges will need to be addressed, but, perhaps, there is a better place to start. This really is a matter of whether we see the glass as half empty or half full.