I've had cause in recent months to ponder inactivity. Not inactivity due to laziness, nor inactivity due to invalidity but rather the paralyzing inactivity that comes from seeking perfection in what we do.

I have a *cough* friend *cough* who is a perfectionist that falls into bouts of procrastination because of the compounding nature of time and tasks. For example, say we have a job to do but we want to do it properly so we wait until we have enough time to give it's due attention. A week or so later the task is still there but it will now take 3 days instead of 1 to complete because we didn't start on it earlier. Now we need to find 3 days in our busy schedule and on it goes. (Housework is a prime example of this.)

Sometimes our quest for perfection gets in the way of getting the job done and this compounds the original task and can potentially send us into a reactive depression which colors our view of all the other little things that need doing. I am certainly not an advocate of "close enough is good enough" but I believe that we need to take a step back and examine our motives in how we perform our ministry.

Just before I started my training for ministry (around 10 years ago) I had a conversation with someone who helped to confirm my calling. This great godly man who later mentored me had fallen into what I like to call the Cult of Perfectionism. He contended that what God truly seeks are "men of excellence" (excuse the gender bias) who will take God's Word out into the world.

This sounds great on paper, I resonated deeply with this phrase "men of excellence" and made it somewhat of a personal goal to do everything I can to the level of excellence. Perhaps it was pride that resonated with the statement but what I didn't realize at the time is the enormous pressure that it puts me under to succeed.

When we hold church leaders up to the unerring standard of "excellence" we are doing them a great disservice. Granted that leaders live in the fish bowl and Scripture says that leaders will be held to a higher standard but if we don't give leaders room to fail in the small things how are they to learn in the big things?

My first taste of ministry was in youth work, a wonderful place to start. It teaches you patience, endurance and above all gives you a place to fail gracefully. I learnt more about ministry by failing here than succeeding elsewhere. What I mean by failure in this context is that I didn't always get things right, didn't always say the right things, lead by example at all times but those teens would always respect you in your repentance and admitting you were wrong.

I put it to us all that our churches need to change our culture from one of excellence to grace, especially in the case of the new leader. Let us support them through their faltering steps into ministry and reap the harvest of a ministry in balance, not one under pressure and paralyzed by perfectionism.

How Many Saturdays?
Source: Jeff Davis

"Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you're busy with your job. I'm sure they pay you well but it's a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. Too bad you missed your daughter's dance recital. Let me tell you something, Tom, something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities."

"You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years. Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3,900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime.

'It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail, and by that time I had lived through over 2,800 Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round-up 1,000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside of a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear. Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away.

'I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.

'Now let me tell you one last thing before I take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure if I make it until next Saturday, then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time."

And 4 more after the jump

It's been quite a while since I last posted. The time gap weighs heavily on me, not because of an obligation to let you know what I'm up to, but because blogging is such a cathartic release.

Conversations with my mentor this week have highlighted the need to continue to let things go before you dry up and become useless. He picked up this post Empty Inside in particular where I made the statement "I feel empty inside, the tank is dry." He told me two things that I wont soon forget.

1. That in his work (he is the Pastor to Pastors for my denomination so he interacts with a lot of them), he see's this all the time. Pastors who have stopped replentishing themselves and have run dry. When you get to that point you start to dig in to the wrong parts of your character, the unredeemed parts, and you always end up regretting it.

2. The second thing he told me is that he doesn't want to see me ever writing something like that again.

He wasn't telling me to censor my thoughts, but rather to be more deliberate in how I plan my time with my family, church work, other work commitments and everything else. If I don't, if I continue to burn myself out, I might find myself looking back at my alienated family, failing ministry and failed life.

I read a story this week about a baptist pastor who was so consumed with his ministry that he didn't have time to mow his lawn. One night his wife reminded him that tomorrow morning all his daughters friends would be coming around for her birthday party and he realized that the knee high grass wasn't really child friendly. So in the middle of the night he went out and with a torch in his mouth cut the grass.
When he was half done he looked around and noticed that peeping behind the curtains were all his neighbours wondering what the hell was going on. At that point he realized that his authenticity with his neighbours was completely shot, why would they entertain a religion that keeps someone so busy?

It's food for thought.

Today I'm thinking about what constitutes a spiritual retreat.

I'm (trying) to write this Sunday mornings sermon and I keep coming up with the same nothing that the last 20 revisions came up with. I think that I really need to get my physical and spiritual batteries recharged and quickly or I am going to continue to slide into trouble.

The problem is every time I've attempted such a venture in the past I either get distracted by something and chase that down or I force the issue so hard that God can not meet me. It's a bit like writers block, the more you push it the harder it is to get the words out.

One of my favorite movies is "Stranger than Fiction". Right now I can identify with the author (sans chain smoking and queen latifa as my personal assistant). I know that there is something there, it is just around the corner. I can feel it's presence just beyond my perception but the harder I reach, the more slippery it becomes.

How do you turn that around? Fasting has worked in the past but my wife doesn't like me doing it. I have a tendency to go to extremes. The last time I fasted I went about 4 days with only a little water and I was a wreck physically. I did however get the answer from God that I was seeking (that is he answered, not he gave me the answer I wanted).

In my sermon I'm going into the area that we can have our spiritual identities stolen if we do not use them, that is, if we are not being the ministers of reconciliation that God calls us to be we will start filling our lives with other things. I feel I've started to fill mine with business and I want it back!