Bite Off More Than You Can Chew?

One of the great joys of writing a book is hearing from old friends who have read it. I hadn't seen my high-school buddy Rick Porter in nearly 40 years. And then we met for coffee while I was vacationing with my family near his home on Cape Cod. A few days later, Rick sent me the following email. He had just finished reading the chapter in UNFINISHED BUSINESS about a promise I had made but failed to keep to a boy in a refugee camp. (I had told the boy that I would fill the camp's library with books, which I didn't even begin to do.) It took me 15 years but, with my daughter's help, I finally realized that I had been unable to fulfill my promise to the boy because I had bitten off far more than I could chew, something I too-often do. My 13-year-old daughter convinced me that one box of books, assembled by her and her siblings, would constituent a genuinely useful gift to Kakuma's library.  The broader lesson for me was: If I'm going to fulfill my promises and contribute to the benefit of other people, I need to scale down my ambitions and make them easier to achieve in the context of my everyday life. It was a lesson that resonated with my friend Rick, who is a Presbyterian minister.

Pastor Rick wrote: "I really liked your daughter's wonderful idea to simply buy, pack, and send some children's books to the refugee camp.  I especially loved your insight about SCALE.  My whole life I've wanted to be involved with BIG things:  events, congregations, budgets, movements.  I always longed for the splash, panache, flash that seemed to emanate from my high-life parents.  But, since college, in God's wisdom, I've continually been placed in places of  'downward mobility' (to use Henri Nouwen's term):  a counter-cultural campus ministry, a less-than-well-known seminary, a small urban fringe church that did not grow in numbers over 21 long years, and work in two small Christian schools.  I've had to shed my dream of the big for an appreciation of 'Jesus' math.' a term my pastor uses for counting by ones.  If I use that measure, I have touched many lives, one or two at a time.  And God only knows how those years of ministry will bear fruit. In this vein, I love the prayer of Moses in Ps. 90:  'Establish the work of our hands, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.'  In other words, we can't control the results of our work; we leave them to Him."

Although I'm Jewish and still struggling to define my personal belief in God, I love the idea of 'Jesus math' and the notion that our acts of kindness and mentorship add up, one person at a time, to a better world, even though ultimately we can not control the results. In future blogs I'll share some thoughts about Henri Nouwen, the Catholic priest and theologian who spent the last years of his living and working in a small community of developmentally disabled adults. I'll also share Pastor Rick's favorite "unfinished business" quote front the Bible. Hint: It's in the Book of Job.