Friday, July 30, 2010

Currency exchange.

I’m kind of a learner. I have been accused of being hard headed, and resistant to instruction in the past, stop laughing mom, but in the last few years I can honestly say the thing I have desired the most is to learn. Specifically, to learn to “be a man”, and “grow up”, to be a leader and to earn the following of the people God’s called me to serve. So I have tried to surround myself with people who will help me do just that. I have a great group of friends and mentors. Last week I was in need of both. I was fired from a job I really loved, serving a group of students that I really love and was a little on the fence about how I felt about all of that. So out went the text messages and phone calls and emails and carrier pigeons and …wait, scratch that last one. It was a pretty diverse group of people ranging from former pastors I had worked under to this one guy, that honestly, I barely know but has a ton of experience and wisdom. It would be easy for me to fill a blog post about all the good advice they gave. But the thing that I think I’m going to take away from this week is the lesson I learned when I backed up and looked at it from a distance; the currency of the Kingdom of God is not measured in dollars but in minutes.
Everything in the world operates on this principle. Each day is equal to the last and the next and the success or failure of each day is hinged entirely on how you spend each second. Your paycheck is an exchange of your seconds for pennies. Your passing grade in physics is relative to the time you studied. The depth of your marriage swings on the balance of time spent engaging your spouse. The obedience of your children is reliant on the time you have spent disciplining them. Everything you could ever amass traced back to its procurement happened because of an exchange of time for goods.
This week has been tough, no doubt, but it has been profitable beyond description. God has allowed me to be a repository of his grace and many people have made huge deposits. Great men, titans of ministry, have passed along to me wisdom and war stories, shown me battle scars and been vulnerable, shared their experiences and hopefully purchased for me with their lives things I hope I never have to experience for myself. A good mentor is someone who has purchased with their time experience, refined that experience into wisdom, and now has put it on loan for others.
Friends on the other hand walk with you through the experience. Like women going to the bathroom together at restaurants, whether they need to go or not, you’re in it together. They take you out to do dumb guys stuff so you don’t have to think about what your missing the first week that you’re not teaching your students. They sit on your floor and fill your house with laughter even when you don’t really want to laugh. They call to check in on what they can be praying for you about, and they actually pray. They trade their lives and their agendas for your life and make you the agenda because they love you.
It is true you know. Your treasure really is where you heart is. We have just done a poor job measuring treasure on a calculator instead of a watch.