Being productive
The other day a pastor colleague was talking about how often he felt his day was unproductive, or at least that there was seldom a finished product, a concrete achievement to point to.
In the shower this morning I was thinking over his remarks and how I NEVER feel like that. On the contrary, one of the things I LOVE about being a missionary pastor is how frequently there is a result ! Maybe my previous work experience has something to do with it.
I was telling someone else the other day that I have been positively vetted and signed the Official Secrets Act. It was way back in the 1980s when I had a brief but glorious time as an Assembly Language programmer doing extensions to system software for a military application. I had three months to write a subroutine that told you if a computer user had pressed a key. Three months. To get one little piece of code working and integrated into the operating system. And it took all of those three months, I can tell you.
Most days I went home having done almost nothing tangible whatsoever. My program had run a bit further, I had sent data through different paths, I had pored over a hexadecimal debug listing for hours to prove that my subroutine worked.
It was like combing a wooly mammoth for nits.
Contrast this with the elation I have felt these past few days over :
linking up a brother with a church in a town far from here
seeing a lady come to church who was furious with lots of us last week
meeting with a lady for the first time who wants to know the gospel
sorting out an afternoon conference on reaching immigrants with the gospel
planning a student houseparty
Almost all these things are small things, but every one has potentially HUGE implications !
In the shower this morning I was thinking over his remarks and how I NEVER feel like that. On the contrary, one of the things I LOVE about being a missionary pastor is how frequently there is a result ! Maybe my previous work experience has something to do with it.
I was telling someone else the other day that I have been positively vetted and signed the Official Secrets Act. It was way back in the 1980s when I had a brief but glorious time as an Assembly Language programmer doing extensions to system software for a military application. I had three months to write a subroutine that told you if a computer user had pressed a key. Three months. To get one little piece of code working and integrated into the operating system. And it took all of those three months, I can tell you.
Most days I went home having done almost nothing tangible whatsoever. My program had run a bit further, I had sent data through different paths, I had pored over a hexadecimal debug listing for hours to prove that my subroutine worked.
It was like combing a wooly mammoth for nits.
Contrast this with the elation I have felt these past few days over :
linking up a brother with a church in a town far from here
seeing a lady come to church who was furious with lots of us last week
meeting with a lady for the first time who wants to know the gospel
sorting out an afternoon conference on reaching immigrants with the gospel
planning a student houseparty
Almost all these things are small things, but every one has potentially HUGE implications !
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