Lessons Through Busyness

Back to the wonderful world of blogging. The last two weeks looked like this for me…

Our team had to move one of our campuses in just four days. Not from high school to high school, but from high school to permanent location. This included build out, painting, décor, cleaning, etc. You name it—we did it in just four days!

We launched another addition of our very successful family experience. This time it’s called “Angry Words” and it won’t take a rocket scientist to figure out our theme.

On top of all that we had to get ready for Easter. To say the very least, my last two weeks were probably some of the busiest weeks I’ve ever experienced.

Here are a couple lessons I learned along the way:

• I totally bombed at hiding my frustration. As you can imagine, moving an entire campus in four days put me a little over the limit in the stress category, especially since this wasn’t a planned move AND we were getting ready for our family experience launch AND Easter was just one and a half weeks away. Why was this bad? Well, I feel as a leader I’m allowed to be frustrated, but I’m not allowed to let it affect other people. There were people “under” me who were given a negative impression of leadership because of my attitude. I had to eat some humble pie and ask forgiveness.
• Serving God isn’t always “cookies and cream”. As a staff pastor I have to trust my leadership. This doesn’t mean I have to agree—it means exactly what I said—I have to trust them. If my pastor feels like this is the best move, I need to bring up my disagreements behind closed doors (which I did), but in the end I need to do my best to make it happen with a great attitude.
• A lot can happen when people are excited about the vision. We got A LOT done in a very short amount of time. It was due to volunteers getting excited about what God can and will do through serving our community. I want to find and create ways to excite our volunteers at all our campuses.
• I wanted everything to be perfect in my four-day move at our new kids building, however I was reminded that parents, members and guests at our church have no idea what “perfect” is. Because we went from temporary to permanent—anything (almost) we would’ve done would have been a great improvement and they would have loved it. Then, we could continue to finish up the building over the next several weeks and with every new added item would add new excitement.

So, as you can see we’ve been busy and God’s been refining me. There’s one thing that I’m absolutely certain of—I love what God is doing through our church and I love leading a great group of world-changers. I’m reminded that as crazy as things get, this is the best “job” ever!

-PJ

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jsmith@churchleaders.com'
Justyn Smith is married to an amazing wife and is a father to five children. He is the children's pastor at South Hills Church in Corona, CA and has a passion to help other children’s pastors become great leaders in their local church and ministry. He consults, writes, and is a frequent conference speaker. Justyn is the host of Celera Kidmin (click http://www.celeragroup.org/network-coaching/kidmin.aspx for more info) and has recently been named one of "Children's Ministry Magazine's" Top 20 to Watch. Twitter: pastorjustyn Facebook: facebook.com/pastorjustyn