A "new" way of doing business

"First you pray, first you pray, the second you see a problem come your way. Most of the time it's last on your mind but first, you need to pray."

Those words are the chorus of the song "First You Pray", from the children's musical Fat, Fat Jehoshaphat, which I performed in twice during my children's choir days back at the church where I grew up. I'm pretty sure I was 11 the 2nd time we did it, and the first time was several years earlier, so I was probably about 7. I'm sure my mom could tell me how old I actually was, because, well, moms remember that sort of thing.

Anyhow, I'm becoming more and more convinced that I learned all the really big, fundamental lessons of faith by the time I was 10, and the rest of my life has just been a process of forgetting them and then re-learning them the hard way. As much as that may sound like a harsh assessment, I'm not sure that it's really that far from the truth. And I'm pretty sure it's not that different for most people, at least for people who grew up in the church.

The lesson of the song I started with is one of those lessons, and I've really been in the process of re-learning it lately. And it's given me a new and more personal understanding of what Jesus was talking about when he said we needed to become like little children to enter the kingdom of God. When I was at the age when I was performing this song, I was so much more likely to live out its message than I have been as I've gotten older. And it isn't because I was too young to anything different back then. I was too young to BELIEVE that I knew different. Children are under no illusion regarding their size relative to the size of their problems - they KNOW they aren't big enough to deal with them. As I've gotten older, I'm not really convinced that I've become much better equipped to deal with my problems, or at least to do so successfully, but I do know that I'm much more likely to think I can deal with them. "I can handle that, no need to bother God with this one." I can think of a couple fairly significant things, both personal and with other situations, that I've been dealing with over the last several months, and when I stack up the time I've spent worrying, talking, being frustrated, etc about them with the time I've spent praying about them, it's pretty sad.

This has really come home to me in my dealings in leadership at CrossWalk. As I've alluded to recently, we've been going through some struggles. And, along with the rest of the leadership team, I set out to solve the problems. Our leadership team meets on a monthly basis, and our normal meeting would look as such: We'd have one person pray for us as we opened, then we'd spend a good two hours or more talking about problems and plans and strategies, and then we'd close with one person praying, and then we'd be done. When I came back from Thailand, I was convinced that we needed to make seeking God through prayer a more significant part of our meetings, so at our last meeting, I called a hard stop 20 minutes before our usual ending time for us to pray. However, at the leader's meeting I mentioned last Friday, I became convicted of the fact that that order was backwards, and that we needed to start by seeking God. This morning was our first meeting since then, and that's what we did.

The result was the best "business meeting" I've ever been involved in. We started (15 minutes late, mind you) with an extended prayer time, which I'm not sure ever officially ended. But we did spend about 15-20 minutes in uninterrupted prayer, and then it was like we just did our business in the midst of the prayer time, talking for a while and then winding back up in prayer, and then repeating the process. Pretty wild. We got done 15 minutes early, and I felt like we'd accomplished more than normal. And the reality is that we probably did.

So, I'm liking the early returns on this "new" way of doing business, and I'm looking forward to moving forward with it.