My First Mistake

I was recently remembering the first big mistake I made at this church, back when I was so new that I imagined I was making mistakes every minute. I foresaw these mistakes would become visible slowly over time as people knew me better and trusted me enough to reveal the fact that I had stomped on their toes while I was getting settled in.

At my first church I had been the closet queen. I had gone through every art supply and piece of fading construction paper with a team of volunteers and had put a bi-annual closet cleaning event into the church calendar.

When I first came to this new congregation the closets were SERIOUSLY over-stuffed. Even in my own office there was not 6" for me to hang a file in the overflowing file drawers. The rooms were also rich with art supplies and books and games, and by rich I mean junky-looking.

So I said in an offhand way to our church administrator "These closets are gross, and what's up with the junk in the classrooms? This is not acceptable."

Her brow furrowed, "but (T) your predecessor worked so hard on those. She was in there for weeks cleaning things out. We've been working together to make things better for you." It was proven out over time that (B) our administrator had been on junk and clutter patrol, and kept on it for the next 3 years we worked together with relatively minor assistance from me. Before she was taken from us, the junk was down to respectable level, and the closets and rooms were totally usable. Our closet volunteers have done a great job maintaining the order, and all I have to do is preside over seasonal purges.

The moral of this story is: When you see something in your community that does not meet your standards, ask first "What's the story?" because you may find that it took a lot of hard work just to get it to the place it is.