Tag Archives: mistakes

Mistakes, Humility, and Learning

by

Mistakes are part of what it means to be on mission with Jesus.

How do I know this?  Read the Gospels and look at the dozens and dozens of mistakes that the disciples make as they try to follow Jesus.  Mess up, after mess up, after mess up.  Confusion on top of confusion.  Mistakes galore.

How else do I know this?  Because I have experienced this more often in the last few months of my life than I would like to admit.  And these last few months have been filled with my wife, my community, and I making attempts to be on mission with Jesus.

 

Mistakes

Why is this the case?  Why do we seem to make a bunch of mistakes when we try to be on mission with Jesus?  I think there are two primary reasons:

  1. Following Jesus Is Risky — To be on mission with Jesus means that we put our safety and comfort aside for what really matters.  And what’s that; what really matters?  God’s will, that’s what.  And what is God’s will?  Friends, this is not trick question and it’s not that complicated.  Really.  From the beginning to the end of the Bible we see it.  Namely, God’s will is to be involved with reconciling all things to God in Christ (2 Corinthians 5.19).  In God’s economy there nothing of more worth than this!  This goal is worth risking everything.  And as we risk stuff, we will make mistakes.  Maybe we’ll risk the wrong thing.  Maybe we’ll focus our attention in the wrong place.  Maybe we’ll hurt lots of feelings by focusing on one thing and not on another.  The point is this: being on mission is risky and with risk comes mistakes.
  2. Following Jesus is Messy — If being on mission with Jesus means being involved in the reconciliation of all things to God in Christ, then this is going to be messy.  Why is that?  Simple: fixing broken relationships is hard.  Just think about the last time you hurt someone and needed to make things right with them.  How’d that go?  Was it easy?  Was it nice and tidy?  Probably not.  I’m sure it was a mess.  And in the midst of that mess we’re going to make a ton of mistakes.  We just will.  We’ll try our best and we’ll still mess up.  We’ll have the best intentions and yet we’ll still hurt people that matter to us.  We’ll be actively engaged in reconciliation and we’ll actually damage the person or people we’re trying to reconnect with.  And our mistakes will be in our behavior, our words, and our postures.  Reconciliation = mistakes.  That’s a universal law right there with gravity.

Humility

So there are a few responses to making mistakes:

  1. Pretending — We can act like we’re perfect and that we never, ever make mistakes.  Some of us are so used to doing this that we don’t even recognize it anymore.  It’s just part of our lives.  We lie.  Let’s just call it what it is.
  2. Shutting Down — We make mistakes.  We try again.  Then we make more mistakes.  Then we try.  Mistakes.  Try.  Mistakes.  Etc.  So, eventually we just quit trying.  We shut down.  We quit.
  3. Getting Defensive — So we make some mistakes and some of us defend ourselves.  Maybe we’ll make some excuses.  Maybe we’ll tell the person or people we have hurt all the reasons that they are wrong about how they feel and that the mistake we made is actually not really a mistake at all.  If this sounds familiar to you, then you’re a lot like me.  Yay for you!
  4. Becoming Humble — This is the goal that we should all be shooting for.  When we make mistakes we ought to humbly accept our responsibility and begin to make amends.  We shouldn’t lie.  We shouldn’t quit.  And we shouldn’t get defensive.  Instead, we should be humble and seek to continue the reconciliation process.

 

Learning

And the great news, of course, is that if we’re humble we can begin to learn how to make less mistakes.  Now don’t get me wrong; we’re always going to make mistakes.  We aren’t perfect.  But we can begin to learn how not to make the same mistakes over and over again.

In so doing we’ll hurt the people we love and are trying to be reconciled with a bit less.  We’ll build trust.  We’ll demonstrate our love.  We’ll embody the good news of Jesus.  And we’ll begin to engage more fully in doing God’s will of reconciling all things to himself in Christ.

Some of this learning will be natural, trial-and-error type of learning.  Some of it will be gained through studying.  And much of it will be through listening to people vastly different from us so that we can learn from various perspectives.

 

Mistakes aren’t going away.  So we better figure out what to do when we make them!

 

Friends, how do you deal with making mistakes?  What role do humility and learning play in that process?

Failing at the Elevator Pitch

by
Nemo / Pixabay

Nemo / Pixabay

So yesterday was a big day!  My wife and I were hosting a team of six folks at our place to chat about the mid-sized community that we all help lead.  My goal at this meeting was to cast the missional/incarnational vision very clearly so that the six of us could dream together about how to shift our group from away from being attractional.

So I had been praying and preparing for several days.  I had a solid feel for what I would say and how I would say it.  Then I checked my email and I noticed a message from the Michael Hyatt newsletter.  If you don’t know, Michael Hyatt is a publisher, author, blogger, and leadership coach and consultant.  There’s a bunch of stuff on his blog about leadership, personal development, developing your brand, etc.  He’s really great!

Well the email from his newsletter linked to a really interesting article called “Why You Need an Elevator Pitch (and How to Create One)”  An elevator pitch is a short but effective way to tell someone about your idea in a limited amount of time, say the amount of time you have in an elevator with someone.  Michael Hyatt gave four pieces of advice:

  1. Describe your idea.
  2. Talk about the problem.
  3. How can your idea help solve the problem.
  4. What’s the key benefit of your idea.

I wrote these four phrases on a piece of paper and stuck it in my pocket.  My plan was that all throughout the day I would use the elevator pitch idea to think more carefully about how to cast vision with the team that evening.  I practiced while driving, in my mind while hanging out with friends, while in the shower, before leading a devotional, while at an immigration-reform rally, and then while cleaning the house.

I had honed the pitch down to two sentences: “My hope is for us to view ourselves as missionaries where we work, play, and live because the “if you build it, they will come” version of church just isn’t working anymore.  We can accomplish this by being more intentional about our up (connection with God), our in (community), and our out (service) and in so doing we can begin to express tangibly God’s love in our world.”

Saying those two sentences takes no more than thirty seconds.  That’s it.  Thirty seconds.

Why, then, in the moment with the team in our living room, did I spend twenty minutes explaining the vision!  Ugh.  I really blew it.  Luckily the team knows me pretty well and each of them has extended grace to me before.  And, despite my inadequacies, they all seemed to understand what I was talking about to some degree.

It wasn’t a total loss.  But as an elevator pitch it was an epic failure!

Has something like this ever happened to you?  Tell me about it in the comments.

Here’s book I recommend by Michael Hyatt about developing your brand: Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.