Approach with Caution

My friend and co-worker lost his six year-old daughter a year ago yesterday. I hate to admit this but I didn't remember until Wednesday - too late to send a card. I wondered if I should call or email or send him a message. He was on iChat Wednesday and today with the message "a year Thursday - ping with caution". I thought about how appropriate and how honest that is. Relationships can be unpredictable and messy and sometimes it seems like they should come with warning signs.

As I slowly enter my new role as Community Manager I recognize that I have a lot of learning to do and experience to gain if I want to be an effective leader. I did an online search today for leadership skills and I came across this paragraph in an article written for people who move from a technical role to a managerial role:

Your role as a manager will also require that you become a strong conceptual thinker, with ability to analyze unstructured situations and to interpret information needed for effective decision making. Much of what you will be confronted with will be characterized by the ambiguity and complexity inherent in human interactions, compared to technical certainties.

When people would ask me what I liked about programming I would often say that I liked the certainty of an answer. If something goes wrong in a software program or on a website I always knew that I could fix it because an answer exists - I just had to find it. Moving into a role where many of the problems I will encounter will not have any certain right and wrong answers is a bit scary and also very exciting. It is exciting because people and relationships, while they are complex and messy, are what the very heart of God cares about.

Yesterday Mark held the second class about his new book, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice. He talked about false and true dangers of worship. We often go to worship for reasons other than to encounter the living God. Just as encountering other people and building relationships with other people can be complex, unpredictable and make us vulnerable - encountering God can be all those things on a much greater scale. In Mark's book he quotes Annie Dillard who wrote:

It is madness to wear ladies' hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

If I want to stay in a safe place where all the answers are readily available to me if I just search hard enough or work hard enough then my greatest fear may be encountering God. With fear and trembling I am ready to grow both in my career and in my relationship with God and the people he places in my life. I desire to meet the living God "who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us" and who grafts us, adopts us, makes all things new and gives us new life and a new way of living. Opening myself up to this kind of change does not come naturally and I resist it often. I am only able to want to want this change in my life because of the Holy Spirit working in me and the knowledge "that in all things God works for the good of those who love him" and that the God I put my trust in is trustworthy.