Failure, Change, and Grace

Public speaking has been part of my ministry for about a decade now. Not a huge part, but a part. I’m pretty good at it. I’m often somewhat nervous but that pressure tends to have a positive effect: I rise to the occasion. And I love passing on things I’ve read or study or experienced, and telling stories, making people laugh, or connecting them to ideas, resources or opportunities that can really help them.

But about once a year I blow it. Usually this has to do with some kind of miscommunication with the event organizers, on my part or theirs. I don’t understand what they really need (often they don’t) and I end up preparing the wrong kind or amount of material, or struggle to adjust gracefully to the actual conditions when I arrive: the technology, or the room, or the number of students, the class ‘culture,’ or other things that happen during the meeting. I’ve run into enough of the typical problems over the years that I can usually predict, prepare for, or prevent the train wrecks; it takes a lot more to really throw me off now. But sometimes I’m still taken by surprise.

Here's the latest snafu. About a year ago I got a call from Steve, a friend who is in mission leadership for a Lutheran denomination. Pastor Steve and I get along great. He asked me to come give a plenary session in April 2007 at their denomination’s annual conference for the leaders of outreach ministries and missions. I’d done this once before, almost ten years ago, and they gave me the biggest honorarium I’ve ever received: $1000 for a one-hour talk (plus being there the whole weekend).

So, pride or greed may have been part of my motivation for accepting the invitation to this spring’s conference out in St. Louis. I didn’t really feel like I had it in me to give them something worthwhile! I was hoping for some inspiration. And I didn’t hear from anyone for months. Steve had moved into a new position and was not as involved in conference planning as he had been. He’d requested and I’d sent a ‘bio’ right after Christmas. When I was laid off and our ministry closed down in February, I thought: They probably don’t know how to find me, but if they tried, they would realize I may not be available… right?

I was still thinking about St. Louis when I made my plans to go to Central Asia. But I didn’t call and tell anyone there that I was going to be out of the country. I just, well, dropped the ball, and assumed they would notice we had not had any communication, would quietly rearrange the schedule and write me out of it. I’m not sure why I thought that, why I was so passive about the whole thing. It’s not that I’d forgotten. I just did not feel up to doing it, or even admitting that this was the case. When my plans suddenly changed and I came back to States a month early, I realized: Oh, that conference in St. Louis. Wonder if I should do anything. But I didn’t.

So today, I’m at home, but my friend Steve reached someone in our office. Apparently he was quite anxious to talk to me, saying they had not heard from me and was I still planning to be in St. Louis this weekend?

Oops. I’ve been found out! I can’t believe I was so irresponsible about all this. Waves of guilt swept over me. I still didn’t think I should be there, I didn’t have a good message for them, but how could I be so unreliable, such a bad communicator?!

I cleaned my room. I heated up my coffee. Checked my email. Then I called Steve.

Man, he was gracious. He completely absolved me of guilt and offered me grace, told me I was off the hook and to rest easy. When the leadership team met this morning he had learned that communicating with me had fallen through the cracks, he realized that I was probably not coming. They were able to make a plan B, and everything will be fine. Maybe the biggest blessing is that Steve pointed out that in spite of all the changes we’ve both gone through we have a ton in common; he wants to stay in touch, recognizing we may find opportunities to work together again. I remind him of his daughter; he always mentions this. She’s about my age and works in a volatile part of South Asia, actually as part of the mission I’m associated with now.

As we talked about the sudden demise of Caleb Project, Steve expressed (as others have), a belief that God may use the situation to take the Caleb Project DNA and get it out into new places. He said God is 'rearranging the furniture' in all kinds of ways. “I’ve never seen so much change in the body of Christ in my life as I have in the last few years,” he explained. Everything is being shaken up, he said, in missions, in the church. He figured he might as well accept the change that came to him as well, moving out of the big denominational mission office to overseeing a smaller agency focused on Central America. Steve is big on challenging the status quo. In fact, that’s basically what he had asked me to speak on when he wrote me a year ago:

“We see you as being an outside prophetic voice to help us see some new possibilities for mission and outreach. We would expect and encourage you to really challenge us in some areas that Lutherans need to be challenged such as 1) the role of women in God’s mission 2) the remaining challenge of reaching the unreached in our time 3) working with national and ethnic leaders to accomplish God’s mission 3) how we can involve everyone in God’s mission including children and young people 4) how God is involving congregations in high-end, strategic work today and 5) how mission agencies and congregations can work together in synergistic ways!”

Maybe this message (or some part of it – what a list!) is one I need to put together for my own sake. Perhaps the core issues I’m struggling with in following my calling these days are hope and courage. I am discouraged, and slim on hope. I need courage, encouragement, someone to revive my heart and hope after a season of loss and disappointment. So, I’m glad I talked to Steve. He’s a man of grace, a risk-taker and pastoral-type at the same time. What a lovely combination. That’s really the kind of person I want to be, too.

We DID have a good meeting yesterday, the little band of four of us still working together to provide various kinds of cultural-learning experiences ( like research teams, ethnography training, and Encountering the World of Islam classes). We didn't entirely identify who we want to be, what we think we can do, and who and what we need to help us, but made considerable progress in those things. So that encourages my heart as well.