CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…
My wife is a management
expert. I mean that factually. She has two degrees in it.
One of her management
maxims is about planning: The best time to plan for a recurring event, like a
birthday or holiday, is while you are going through it currently, because you
will learn now what works and what doesn’t. Make notes so that you’ll have them
when you plan for next year.
I learned most of my
management techniques from her, so a long time ago I started preparing two
sermons each week, one for the immediate Sunday and one for the Sunday a year
off. I had a folder for each. In the olden days, it was a paperboard folder I
kept in a metal four-drawer cabinet. In my latter days, it was a folder in a
computer. I always had some material that would not fit this week but might be
useful next year. I had a good start when the Fourth Sunday in Lent—or whatever
it was--came around again.
Sometimes, though, that
sort of planning seems… well, odd.
A wedding planner told our
daughter of a recent client. She said, “She had a binder in which she kept materials
and ideas for her wedding. She was making notes in it as we talked. I made a
suggestion I thought was pretty good, and she did, too, but she said, ‘Oh, that
won’t work because of my color scheme, but I can use that in my next wedding.’
And she pulled out a second binder and put that idea into it. She was assuming
this marriage would fail so she was planning for her next wedding already!”
There is surely something
that needs to be said about that, but for the life of me, I can’t think of what
it might be. I’ll put it in the folder for next year and see if I have
something by then.
JRMcF
johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com
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