Over the last three years I gutted and remodeled a 115-year-old house.
One of the things that is becoming painfully obvious now, about the time we have finished up the remodel, is that it’s time to go back to the first things. It’s true. Some of the walls need patching, touch-up paint and cleaning. My carpet isn’t brand new anymore. There are nail pops and squeaky hinges, doors that don’t latch right and drains that don’t drain right.
And the same is true in business, and ministry.
As we have welcomed our new food service director Annemarie to camp over the last week, she is helping me to see some of the same old things that we addressed when I was new, with the same kind of freshness I saw it with then.
The reality is that it is time to go back to some of those same rooms and look at them for the first time again. There places we’ve probably become sloppy, may have neglected, or that have just aged since I first began. And familiarity means I may not be using the same intentionality now, third time around, that I used when I was doing it the first time. My communication—both in telling and
asking—is probably not as thorough as it was, by necessity, in the beginning.
These are not gross failures: the roof doesn’t leak; the house isn’t burning down. It’s just time to look at them again with fresh eyes.
Here are three questions to ask that might help you evaluate what needs your attention next:
- If I were new to my role today, what’s the first thing I would change?
- If we were buying this property now, how would we improve it, big or small, to help us better achieve our mission?
- If I were moving on to another organization, what would I do to ensure I left everything well, and ready for the next ‘new guy’ to succeed?
I’ve often heard friends and family, in the process of fixing up their houses to sell them, say they wish they’d done those things years before and had more time to enjoy them. Well, what are you waiting for?
