emptying Offices to fill people
"An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
Rudyard Kipling
I am a professional Christian by Calling and vocation. My official titles are interchangeably Missionary; College Minister or College Director. This is the Office I hold or the Job I do depending on how you perceive those roles.
Last week I was in the middle of a serious conversation with one of our students when he stopped in mid sentence and asked me this provoking and surprising question: "am I talking to Robert the professional Christian or Robert my friend?" I laughed out loud and explained that the professional persona of Robert is only used when dealing with artificial constructs and inanimate objects. Everyone gets to meet Robert the Man. The question came about because he was about to answer a very personal question and wanted reassurance that it wasn't some Christian Office he was talking to, but the real man he trusted.
I have many friends who hold the title of "Clergy" who are real men and women that are filling a difficult and necessary role within our society. While their job is relational, the Office they hold is impersonal.
My preferred way of coaching/teaching people is through Imitation rather than Information. This preference demands that my life be both worthy of imitation and also that I not only make myself available but also transparent and vulnerable enough to allow them sufficient interaction with me to figure out what it is in my life that is actually worth imitating.
When my professional persona is activated it is usually to deal with artificial Constructs like Money, Methodology, Communication aids, Administrative tasks, Organizational demands, and Strategic Planning. Even in these artificial situations the professional is deactivated the moment a person enters that situation.
People interact with people. They hate to interact with impersonal programers.
I spend hours of my week constructing inanimate objects that we call safe places where people can be themselves. Whether that is working on what our financial needs are and how to best meet those needs, or creating the methods we use to produce a weekly event, or ensuring my schedule is interacting effectively with reality and not rolling over people to get a program launched, it all requires me to have the capacity to do impersonal tasks for the purpose of creating opportunities to interact personally with real people. I schedule a call with a prospective donor, the planning for that call is just business not personal, that is until the prospective financial donor answers the call and then it is only personal and no business at all.
My Professional Persona can plan a meeting, create a presentation, have an agenda, but unless my Personal Persona shows up to that meeting it tends to end rather badly.
According to the American taxman I am one of America's Clergy, it sets me in a certain tax designation and allows that inanimate organization to interact with me..... when I interact with the inanimate machine that is the internal workings of our Mission Organization, I am simply a Job Title and the designation "MO96", this impersonal posturing allows the Taxman or the Mission Organization to deal with a flood of serious situations effectively and efficiently. I remind myself forcefully when one of these artificial edifices offends me that they are a machine and not a person. I can't ask Young Life to act personally, for it isn't a person, nor is the tax authority a real person, nor the organizational structures within my local church.
So I keep my professional persona for those times when I am dealing with a non-human situations like Taxes, Christian organizational structures and automated telephone calls.
But for all the humans I meet on a daily basis my name is Robert and I am a real boy!
I long ago chose to constantly empty myself of whatever Office I hold and focus myself on filling my life with people and helping those people fill themselves with life.
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