Don’t neglect periodic maintenance
This has been an interesting couple of weeks. My wife and I are about 80% through the major project of repainting the exterior of our house–with all the scraping, puttying, sanding, climbing, and spilling that that implies. Last week my car turned over 60,000 miles so I took it in to have the transmission fluid changed. Today at lunch I worked on our lawn mower, changing the blade, oil, spark plug, and air filter.
My dad has always loved his cars, and he taught me that if you really care about something you work hard to maintain it well. He could never understand people whose cars had rust, dings, or even dust on them. But it’s not that hard to explain…when things are working we tend to take them for granted and pay attention to other things.
Ministries are like that too. Unfortunately they don’t come with a book of scheduled maintenance like cars do. We don’t see an odometer rolling over reminding us that it’s time for us to pay attention to things. And so we can forget about some of the things necessary to keep them running smoothly. Little things like…people.
Any child with a rebellious sibling has probably had the feeling: I’m the good one so why is he/she getting all the attention? We do the same thing to our volunteers when we spend all our time working on problem situations and don’t spend time loving and appreciating the people who are serving well and without problem. They need regular reminders that we care about them and appreciate them…or they just might become problems!
Funny thing…when I turned the mower over to change the blade I discovered a really nasty crusted mass of grass that had been growing layer by layer and getting progressively more disgusting. It was only because I took time to do regular maintenance on other things that I discovered something else that really needed attention.
Is there anything ugly growing in your ministry that you don’t even know about because you’ve neglected its periodic maintenance? If you got together with a no-problem volunteer just to say thank you, might the conversation turn up something you need to know?
