July 2016 – Page 3 – Chris Marshall Resources

The Unexamined Life…

Thousands of years ago Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” His words related to his decision to end his life rather than remain in prison where he would not be able to reflect and consider all the facets of life. I have used his quotes many times in my life simply to remind myself that if I don’t stop to reflect on what is happening in and around my life, I will miss out on many times to grow as a person and leader.

This past weekend was a tremendous time of celebration at New Life Christian Ministries. As I noted in a post last week, I have never been good at pausing to celebrate the goodness of God, the “wins” of life, and the milestones reached along life’s way. This past weekend was a major step forward in that area for me, as we stopped on Friday evening–ALL evening–to celebrate God, each other, and what God has done in our fifteen years together as New Life. It was great to pause and remember the amazing sequence of events that brought New Life to existence, how God used a couple of people to increase my faith so Nancy, the girls and I would take the step of starting New Life. It was great to remember how many people came along side us from day one, and to see the hundreds of different people God has used to see that New Life has continued to not only exist, but thrive.

I am writing this post on the evening of July 4th. Nancy and I have taken most of the day since Abby left this morning to pause and celebrate what God has done in our lives and particularly what He did through the weekend. The community fireworks display we provided as the “cap” on the celebration weekend proved to surpass all of our expectations. People from the community gathered in large numbers to watch the display. Our parking lot and property were full for the event as more than 1,000 people joined us. I’m told the parking lot of the local primary center was full and that people lined Knoch road and another small business’ parking lot for the event. Everyone I saw was enthusiastic about the opportunity to pause and celebrate together.

I must remember this moment of examination on taking the time to celebrate, because it has helped me to see that celebrating is a great gift and blessing in life. Thanks to all who served in anyway at New Life’s 15th anniversary celebration. Thanks to all who participated in any way. Thank for helping me to realize once again that pausing to celebrate is one of the ways life is made richer and more meaningful. As I pause on a regular basis to examine my life, I’m going to remember to ask, “When was the last time I stopped to celebrate what God is doing in my life and in the lives of those around me?

Here’s to leading better, by pausing to examine our lives and learning from that examination–today!

Leading In A “Free” Society

Having traveled to serve Jesus in several “closed” or communistic societies, I am aware of some of the differences between leading in a “free” society and a closed one. On this 240th birthday of the United States of America, I am grateful to God for living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I am also aware that in my lifetime, 59 short years, this society has moved “forward” in its freedoms in ways not many could have anticipated when I was born. I’m not pining for the “good old days” as I write this post, nor do I miss the America I grew up in as I have seen on many signs and posters recently. I do miss certain aspects of that America, as I’m sure most people miss certain aspects of the world the way it was when they were children, or at least the world they way they remember it.

What has changed the most in my lifetime, and what matters most significantly for those of us living and leading in the free society known as the United States of America is the disdain for “absolute truth” and the increasing bias against those who ascribe to the belief that the basis for truth is the God of the Judaeo-Christian Bible. So long as we agree with our culture’s bias against absolute truth, and the idea that everyone’s ideas are equally as valid (or invalid?) as everyone else’s we are fine. No one bothers us much if we agree to “tolerate” everyone and agree that their beliefs are “right.” The problem with that way of thinking is how the words tolerate and right are being defined these days. When I was a child to tolerate a person or idea meant to acknowledge the person or idea, and to agree to let that person or idea coexist with me. It did not mean that I agreed with the person’s view points, or that I accepted the idea. In fact, Aristotle (who was around a little while before me!) said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

It is becoming increasingly true that if you and I hold to a Christian perspective as a leader, both we and our views will be considered intolerant and even hateful. I have dedicated my adult life to learning, living and teaching the biblical concept of speaking the truth in love. That requires a body of truth to learn, live and teach, and an understanding of love as an action– specifically a self-giving preference for the good of others–rather than mere feelings. The challenge in leading from a truth in love perspective in this particular free society at this particular moment in history is that many, and particularly many among the intellectual and political establishment have forgotten the historical basis for the United States of America. The framers of the Constitution and those who led in the first generation of the United States of America, are often portrayed as deists who acknowledged a god, but feared the establishment of the biblical God as the official deity of our nation. Any historian who has actually studied the words of those early American leaders knows that they believed in absolute truth, in an absolute Source of that truth, and that this nation could not endure without the application of truth and the benevolence of God.

So what are we to do as leaders in this free society known as the United States of America as it becomes increasingly obvious that to hold to these “traditional” views of truth is considered, intolerant, out of touch, and even “evil”? We must remember our heritage. We have long held that while we may not agree with a word another American says, we will defend to the death that American’s right to say it. Of course, that right does not extend to hate speech, but we must be clear that it is not hateful for a person to speak the truth in love, even if we disagree with what truth and love are. When I say that a certain action is a sin, for example, and I say that out of a genuine concern for the welfare of the sinner, every fiber of American history supports me in that endeavor.

To be clear Christians or those who claim to be Christians have not always spoken the truth in love as is our mandate from the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4. We are rightly called “haters” if we condemn those for whom Jesus died, because they are living in sin. After all, as we know ALL of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I have often been ashamed of those in the Christian community who have spoken the truth in a tone that makes it clear that love is the farthest action from the speaker’s mind and heart. As leaders who bear the name of Jesus in this society, we must be absolutely clear that we always speak from the position of being forgiven sinners, and not as those who have somehow moved passed our own imperfections.

As we move deeper and deeper into the 21st century, to be a Christian leader in the USA is going to mean becoming more and more loving and gracious even as we become bolder in speaking the truth. We must not yell, stomp our feet, or demand that people hear us. Our words and our actions must reflect the humility of our ultimate leader, Jesus Christ. I have found that when people disagree vehemently with my position as soon as they find out I am a Christian, they are reacting to the caricature of what they think I am rather than who I am. As I listen to their perspective and share mine calmly, but confidently, I have found that I am often afforded a hearing. Some folks have changed their perspective of truth. Many more have not, but even those who have not have walked away from the conversation recognizing that not all Christians are haters.

We often say that as Jesus’ followers we are to hate the sin and love the sinner. That is true, but quite difficult to pull of as redeemed sinners ourselves. The challenge is that we tend to extremes. Sometimes forgiven sinners assume we have no right to challenge the sins of others. As leaders we must challenge sin, while remembering that we are still prone to it ourselves, and therefore must be gracious as we speak the truth. The other extreme is far more damaging and must be avoided at all costs: self-righteousness. Jesus condemned the self-righteousness of the Pharisees of His day as vehemently as he ever condemned anything. He called the Pharisees hypocrites, a common term used today in reference to all Christians. We must acknowledge that at some level we ARE all hypocrites. Our words and our actions don’t line up 100%. In those moments we must point to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, noting that while we are not perfect, He was, and we are offering His truth in love in order to preserve the peace, purity and unity of our society.

I love being a citizen of the United States of America. She is still a great nation, one of the greatest nations on the planet. As all human institutions, she is flawed, and those of us who serve as leaders, who also serve Jesus have contributed to those flaws when we have remained silent as the truth has been challenged, or when we have spoken self-righteously as we have stood up for the truth. We risk irrelevance as leaders in this society when we do either. As Carl Shurz said in response to a senator from Wisconsin, who had said, “My country right or wrong,” during a debate in 1872: “In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” We must always be the ones to keep America right, and when she is wrong the ones to set her right.” This is increasingly challenging in an era when there is considered to be no right or wrong. Even so, we must lead from the truth, because there IS truth, and He is also the way and the life!

Here’s to leading better by speaking the truth in love–today!

Learning From Negative Examples

Many years ago when I started seminary, I received some of the best leadership advice I ever received. It came from Pastor Arthur Pace, who was going to be my “field education supervisor.” In other words, I was Arthur’s student pastor. Before I started my year of working with Arthur he sat me down and said, “Chris, over the next year you are going to watch me lead this church and I will do many things well. If you learn from them, you will become a better pastor when you move into the full-time ministry. As you watch me over the coming year, you will also see me make many mistakes and do things poorly. If you discount me as a leader in those moments, you will miss a valuable opportunity: the opportunity to learn how NOT to lead and how NOT to be an effective pastor.” The point is obvious: we can learn from every example in life, not only the good examples, but also the poor or bad ones.

I have always remembered that lesson. I have found myself in many negative experiences and situations over the decades since Arthur offered those wise words of leadership insight. In each of them I have sought to glean the lesson it contained. I have learned how NOT to manage my time, how NOT to lead others, how NOT to respond to criticism, and dozens of other valuable lessons, simply by going through a negative experience and asking how it could have been a positive one.

We can even apply this lesson to ourselves. We all make mistakes. We all sin. Sometimes we even stay in cycles of poor performance or sin, because we fail to learn from them. For example, if I consistently treat others as if I have the right to command them to do what I want since I’m the “leader,” and they don’t seem to respond the way I want them to respond, instead of asking, “What’s wrong with ALL of them?” I will benefit from asking, “Is there something wrong with the way I am leading?” If I’m self-aware at all, I will eventually realize there are many things wrong with the way I am leading, and in this particular case what’s wrong is I am failing to value the people I lead first as people, and then for the gifts and skills they bring to the work environment. Once I realize that I’m part of the problem, and perhaps the biggest part of it, I can change, and the whole environment will change for the better. After all, leadership is influence, so when the leader changes, the environment will change as far as the leader’s influence extends.

Think of your own leadership right now. Is there an area or areas where you don’t seem to be effective, or where you think others aren’t taking you as seriously as they ought to as a leader? Ask yourself: Is it their problem or am I part of the problem? Just asking the question increases our self-awareness, and moves us to greater effectiveness as leaders. If the problem is with the team, then asking the question, can help you see that you’ll need to address the matter and lead the change that’s necessary for the whole team to be more effective.

I hope you’ll take the next opportunity to learn from the next negative situation you experience, because as you do, you’ll become doubly more effective than if you tend to learn only from the positive examples around you!

Here’s to leading better by turning a negative example or situation into a positive learning opportunity–today!

Margin…(Part 2)

Today we’re going to talk about margin in the area of time. If I could have a “do over” in area of my life to this point, it would be in this area. Time is a precious gift from God and once we have invested it or spent it that particular moment is gone. We don’t get to live yesterday, or last week, or a particular situation over again, no matter how much we wish we did. When I think of all the times I have let time slip away unredeemed, I am reminded again of how important it is to make the most of this moment.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to creating margin in our lives when it comes to time is that we assume we have both more control over our lives than we do AND less. Let me explain. I regularly sit down and plan my time. In fact, thanks to Michael Hyatt’s book Living Forward, I sat down for an entire day several months ago and planned out the entire coming year. I included mission trips, vacations, conferences, and the regular daily and weekly commitments. I scheduled time to reflect on the week, and to plan the next. I even scheduled margin. On paper it seemed perfect. That’s the part where we assume we have more control than we do. We CAN schedule or plan our lives and if we’re ever going to have margin in the area of time we must, just as we must create a spending plan if we’re ever going to have margin in the area of money. The challenge is life doesn’t go the way we plan or schedule it.

For example, on Monday morning, I received a phone call that a dear friend of ours from the days we served a church in Cincinnati decades ago had died. Her family asked whether I “had time” to come out and officiate at the funeral. The short answer was, “No, I did not have time.” This is one of the fullest weeks I’ve had for a long time from a schedule standpoint, because of the 15th anniversary celebration of New Life. Saying, “Yes,” would mean a 5-6 hour drive each way, an overnight stay in Cincinnati, and a morning devoted to the funeral. I didn’t have anything specific planned on my calendar for Thursday, since I typically keep it open for big picture planning and writing. I knew the right thing to do: say yes. Doris, the woman who died, wasn’t just a friend, she and her husband had adopted us into their family for the five and a half years we served in Cincinnati. I said, “Yes.” That commitment took up all the margin in my week–but I had margin in my week. I had already completed my message for the weekend. I had already completed my daily blog on the church website for the week. Everything I “had” to get done was already done. That’s what planning does in our lives. It lets us get to the important matters first, and then when life happens-which is where we have less control over time than we think we do–we have margin to address it. Without margin, when the unexpected situations of life come up, are best planned schedules go by the way side.

Yesterday I gave you some specific ideas about what has worked for Nancy and me when it comes to creating and living by a budget or spending plan when it comes to money. When it comes to creating a budget for our time, I commend Michael Hyatt’s Living Forward model. I’ve tried most of the time management planners on the market over the years. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. For me, the most helpful has been the Living Forward model, because it starts with the true end in mind. It has you write your obituary–yes, your obituary. You consider how you want to be remembered in the various areas of your life, and then write that as the beginning of your “Life Plan.” Then you add specific areas that are vital to you. I started with “Quadrant II” areas, things that are important, but not urgent, and wrote a plan for each of them. For example, two of my areas of focus are Spiritual and Physical Growth and Development; and Intellectual and Emotional Growth and Development. In each area I wrote a preferred future, the current reality, and then the steps I’ll need to take to get where I want to go. The process was challenging, but also encouraging, because it has shown me how having a plan–and implementing it can move me toward being who I believe God created me to be.

The key in whatever planning method you use when it comes to time is to SCHEDULE margin for those times that will come up when our schedule is disrupted. We need to have at least an hour each day of scheduled margin, and it’s always best to schedule more time to do tasks around the house, and time with our family than we think we need. That last statement may strike you as strange–schedule time for our family? Yes, because unless we schedule it any block of time is open to the whim of someone else. If we don’t schedule our lives, someone else will. We must schedule family, and reflection, and margin into our lives, so when someone calls or texts and says, “Do you have time to go out for breakfast on Friday,” we can say, “I’m sorry but I have an appointment.” That appointment may be with a spouse, or with yourself. It’s easy in such a moment to say, “I can forego that and make up the time later. Don’t fall for that. We don’t make up time later. Time is a finite “commodity.”

I urge you to invest the time to schedule your time, and to create a spending plan for your money, so that margin may become a reality in your life if it isn’t yet. That way you will be available in those moments when you’re needed for those unexpected opportunities that make life fuller, and you’ll have the money to do those things without having to use credit. Margin is a great blessing that comes to us when we live our lives intentionally.

Here’s to leading better by pausing to make room in our lives to be available for the important and urgent moments we didn’t expect–today!

Margin…

I’ve already mentioned margin in a couple of previous posts, but today and tomorrow I want to devote the entire posts to this important concept. Margin at its simplest means leaving extra room when we budget our time and money, so we’ll have some extra when we need it. Most Americans are all too aware of what it’s like to have margin in neither–to live paycheck to paycheck, and day to day without much of a plan for how to provide margin in either bank accounts or calendars. By definition if we are going to lead we must be different than most Americans when it comes to margin. We must budget both our time and our money intentionally, because if we don’t plan our time someone else will, and as John Maxwell has said, “If you don’t tell your money where to go, you’ll wonder where it went. Leaders need margin if for no other reason than to have more time to think and more resources to apply to leadership opportunities.

I want to be extremely practical with these posts, and not just theorize about what it might look like to put some margin into our calendars and bank accounts. While I learned a long time ago that there is no one “right” way to do most things, particularly when it comes to something as individualized as planning the use of one’s time and money, so I will provide examples today and tomorrow describing what has worked for me. These will not be prescriptions of what will necessarily work for you. I have found quite often that when I read another’s examples of how he or she does something, while it might not fit me exactly, it’s a helpful place to start, rather than totally reinventing the wheel.

For the remainder of this post, let’s consider budgeting money. While I have studied just about every financial planning process out there with a Christian slant, Nancy and I have found that Joseph Sangl’s simple formula I-O=EZ proves quite helpful. The letters in the formula stand for I=Income; O=Outflow; EZ=Exactly Zero. In other words if you add up all your sources of income over a specific period: a week, every two weeks, each month, or whatever your pay periods happen to be, and then subtract all of your outflows over the same period, they need to EQUAL exactly zero. Remember that the outflows include giving and saving, along with all of the typical expenditures and commitments you have made with your money. I like the 10/10/80 “rule” as a guideline for how to disburse our income. The first 10 represents the percentage we give, the second 10 represents the percentage we save, and the 80 represents the percentage devoted to paying all the rest of the bills.

The first time Nancy and I put a budget together and got serious about following it we were surprised by two things: 1) John Maxwell was right! We didn’t realize how much money we were spending that we didn’t know we were spending. 2) Including EVERYTHING in the Outflow area is both crucial and challenging. It’s crucial, because if you don’t know exactly how much you are spending, you won’t be able to balance your budget (or spending plan, as I like to call it!). It’s challenging because the first several months we put together our spending plan, we had to keep adjusting the totals, because we forgot things. We forgot what we call the “1/12 items.” 1/12 items are bills that come due once a year. If you put aside 1/12 of the amount each month, then when the annual bill comes due, you will have the amount you need. A couple examples of 1/12 bills in our lives are life insurance and Christmas presents. Nancy and I each have a life insurance policy that comes due once a year. We simply divide the total cost by 12 and put that amount in a special checking account each month. Then when it comes due, we write a check from that account. We have a Christmas savings account, because we want to have money to buy Christmas presents, and since Christmas is always on December 25th, we start saving the first week of November the year BEFORE the Christmas for which we’re saving. We put $50 in the bank every two weeks (now that we get paid every other week), and then at the end of October we have $1,200 to spend on Christmas. We usually don’t spend that much, so we donate the rest to a charity such as Samaritan’s Purse. We remembered the Christmas 1/12 expenditure several years ago, and it’s been fun to look forward to buying Christmas presents and knowing we won’t be paying for Christmas into the following year.

Nancy and I also found out that our original outflow number was larger than our income. When that happens there are only two ways to balance the equation: add more income or subtract expenses. It’s simpler (not necessarily easier) to subtract expenses. Nancy and I found that we had some “fat” in our spending plan so we started cutting there. We also realized that our savings in various areas are the MARGIN that we’ve been talking about in this post. When we have an emergency fund, (which we do, now!) and an emergency comes up, such as an expensive car repair, or a root canal, or any true emergency, we have money to pay for it. That way we don’t find ourselves using a credit card to pay for emergencies, putting us back into a cycle of debt.

At this time we’ve been working our budget for years, so we’ve been able to eliminate all debt with the exception of the remainder of our home mortgage, and we have developed several additional “margin” accounts. We have an appliance replacement fund, a car replacement fund, and a major repair fund to which we contribute every month. That way when the stove stops working, or the roof needs to be replaced down the road, or we want to buy a new couch, or replace a car we have the money to do so. What we have found is that by putting $25 or $50 away each month in these various funds, the margin increases fairly quickly. Thankfully, a roof only needs to be replaced every thirty years, and a stove every 10-15 years. If you put these replacement funds in the Outflow portion of your budget the money will be there when those eventualities become realities.

If you’re thinking: I could never do all that! The truth is all of us can take a next step from where we are. Nancy and I didn’t realize that we would ever be at place to consider all these eventualities when we first started using the I-O=EZ formula, but what we noticed within a few months was we started to have a little margin. It wasn’t much, but it was there. Over the years the margin has grown. We still don’t have a great deal of day-to-day margin, but we know that a blown transmission, or a broken dishwasher is no longer going to blow our budget. We also know that when a giving opportunity comes up and we believe God is calling us to give to it, we are able to say, “Yes!” far more often than we used to be able to do. That’s a great blessing.

The key is: the younger you are when you start to develop margin in your finances, by developing a workable spending plan and sticking with it over time, the sooner you will have margin and the more margin you will have. As the old saying goes, “The best time to plant an oak tree is fifty years ago. The second best time is today.”

Here’s to leading better by creating or using a spending plan to create or increase margin in our finances–today!