While it can be disheartening to kill a project that you put your heart and soul into, great leaders pick themselves up, learn from it, and keep moving forward to find the light hidden in the darkness. In this week’s episode of By Your Life, we talk about how, when we face what looks like a total failure, we should ask God to reveal the light, the lesson, and the opportunity that is hiding in the darkness.
Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/2019/19_04_21.mp3
Easter Sunday – April 21, 2019
Happy Easter and welcome to the fifty-sixth episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If you haven’t already, please sign up for notifications on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, wherever you listen, or on the right side of this page so I can notify when each new episode is posted. And please forward to a friend, if you think they would benefit from By Your Life.
My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.
In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for Easter Sunday – The Resurrection of the Lord, but before I do, I want to take some time to talk about Holy Week. What a powerful time in the liturgical year. Lent is so good in its demands for self-reflection and self-sacrifice to help us grow in holiness as Christians and in our relationship with God. This growth can’t help but make us more effective at work. And then, you top off this Lenten spiritual development with the “whipped cream” of Holy Week. The richness of the Tradition that draws us all into unity with Christ.
This week, for the first time, I attended our diocese’s Chrism Mass at the Cathedral of St. Jude. I was moved by the procession of hundreds of deacons, priests, and bishops—we had three—who came from every parish in the five counties in which our diocese serves. As much as we have all been harmed by the sins and crimes of some priests and bishops, this gathering reminded me that there are far many more men who have chosen to give their lives, to give everything, and to unite themselves with the Lord Jesus in service to us.
At the Chrism Mass, they recommitted “to be faithful stewards of the mysteries of God in the Holy Eucharist, …to discharge faithfully the sacred office of teaching, following Christ, the Head and Shepherd, not seeking any gain but moved only with zeal for souls.” It was very powerful to hear hundreds of men respond “I am” when they voiced their recommitment.
We know the devil is after our priests. Without priests, there would be no Mass. If there is no Mass, there is no Eucharist. If there is no Eucharist, there is no Jesus, the Real Presence. If there is no Jesus, the Head, there is no Church, the Bride. If there is no Church, there is no vehicle for our salvation. And, if there is no salvation, the only possibility is damnation.
Jesus knew that his presence for all eternity was necessary for our salvation. For this reason, He established the priesthood and the Eucharistic sacrament on Holy Thursday. This is what makes us Catholic Christians. We believe in apostolic succession and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist!
And yet, we, the flock, can be critical of our priests, demand much of them, and walk away when we think they have failed us, forgetting they are human too and therefore they will fail. We do this at work too, having demands of others that we could never live up to ourselves. We express criticism too quickly without seeking first to understand. A simple mind is critical of what it doesn’t understand.
A simple mind is critical of what it doesn’t understand.The Chrism Mass was followed by the beautiful Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday. At this Mass, we heard about the example our Lord gave his disciples by washing their feet and after he had finished, he said, “If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” (Jn 13:14-15) At this Mass, in keeping with our rich Catholic Tradition, we witnessed our priests and deacons as they, in imitation of Christ, provided us the example of servant leaders as they washed the feet of their disciples.
“Servant Leadership” is a term that gets thrown around a lot as being a quality of great leaders. Yet, it is not easy to find examples of great servant leaders in the workplace. There are many reasons for this, but at the root, I think it is because we fail to integrate our faith with our work lives. For some, faith is not a force in their lives and for others, it is kept separate. Faith is relegated to a Sunday activity and not considered again until the next week.
Ken Blanchard, co-author of the best-selling book, The One Minute Manager®, noted this in the book he co-authored with Phil Hodges, The Servant Leader. He said, “Business and beliefs. Jesus and your job. Personal and professional. Servant and leader. Even seeing those words paired together makes many people uneasy. Our sophisticated culture encourages us to draw lines and keep our spiritual lives from our secular lives.”
Another reason servant leaders are rare is that we don’t even consider developing our servant leadership skills. We don’t think twice about picking up and reading some leadership guru’s book, all the while failing to realize that everything they preach has its roots in the Bible, a book we don’t have time to read. Jesus was and is the greatest example of servant leadership for us to follow. We just need to follow him.
I was working with a manager who felt he was doing the right thing by making his family time a priority and not allowing work to spill over to his nights and weekends. Honestly, I believe this is a good and noble priority. There is nothing that makes people more productive than when they set boundaries and leave the office on time. But, in this case, the 5 PM deadline started to become an issue for my client because things weren’t getting done. He had a big project that was continuously being put off because there just didn’t seem to be time in his 40-hour week. The solution my client came up with was to give his project team very clear directions for completing the project on a Saturday. He thought that it would be a great demonstration of his leadership skills if he delegated the project to his team and followed up on Monday to make sure it was completed to his expectations.
This sounded to me a little more like another book by The Arbinger Group Leadership and Self-Deception than it did servant leadership. I asked my client if his project team members had families they wanted to be with on weekends. He said that they did. So, I asked if he thought a great leader would set the expectation for his team to work on a Saturday when he was unwilling to do that himself. Knowing that this was a rhetorical question, we started working on solving the problem of completing the project and protecting weekend time with family. His possible solutions included breaking the project into smaller chunks to be completed by working a little late each night; finding wasted time during the day and moving the project forward during those times; and if there was no other way, scheduling Saturday work around kids’ games and activities.
As we talked about these options, my client realized that he had been too quick to let family be an excuse for his failure to meet his work obligations. He was very proud of being committed to his family, all the while ignoring how he was missing commitments to his company. He wasn’t looking for a “yes-and” solution. That is, yes he should honor his time with family and honor his obligations at work and get his projects done on time. A servant leader honors others and honors commitments.
A servant leader honors others and honors commitments.Holy Thursday led into Good Friday and reminded me that the dark points in our lives cannot compare to what our Lord suffered physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Then, Holy Saturday, a day of quiet waiting, made me think of those times in our lives when we wonder what is next. It can be a time of discouragement, or a time of longing for what we’ve lost. I’m sure Peter and the apostles felt this way. It is how I felt when I had a real job before I started my own business.
I worked on many large new business opportunities. We developed plans for new products or plans to take our existing products to new markets. Because of the nature of our work, we often invested a lot of time and energy into new opportunities that would end up being rejected for funding or we’d get approval to move forward, but then the market didn’t develop as we projected, and we’d have to shut it down. Although I knew that my job was to kill a bad project as early in the process as possible, we also needed to develop the good ones. At times, it was tough to know the difference and it was disheartening to kill a project that you put your heart and soul into. These were not the brightest points of my career.
But then, God would come through with something better than anyone could ever imagine. He turned the darkness into light. We need to remember this when our projects, our jobs, or our careers in general are not turning out the way we hoped.
Reflecting on John’s gospel account of the resurrection, I noted that the story began with Mary of Magdala going to the tomb early in the morning. (Jn 20:1) I thought about what would have happened if she hadn’t done this. What if she and the disciples were so discouraged by what appeared to them to be the biggest failed project of their lifetime, that they just gave up and never discovered the empty tomb early that morning? What if they didn’t see and believe? (Jn 20:8)
But they did go, and they did see, and they did believe. Mary ran and got the others and what previously appeared to be a total loss, was a win beyond their expectations. I think we need to remember this as we take Jesus’ resurrection to work with us this week. When we face what looks like a total failure, we should ask God to reveal the light, the lesson, the opportunity that is hiding in the darkness.
When we face what looks like a total failure, let God reveal the light, the lesson, the opportunity that is hiding in the darkness.But more importantly, we need to put our work in this life into perspective. In his letter to the Colossians, St. Paul says “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above.” (Col 3:1) Consider every challenge, possibility, problem, and opportunity from this perspective and “Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” (Col 3:2) If we do, we’ll recognize that in the scheme of eternity, our great big fat failures this week are not such a big deal.
Pope Francis wrote:
“Let us not stay imprisoned within ourselves but let us break open our sealed tombs to the Lord—each of us knows what they are—so that he may enter and grant us life. Let us give him the stones of our rancor and the boulders of our past, the heavy burdens of our weaknesses and falls. Christ wants to come and take us by the hand to bring us out of our anguish…May the Lord free us from this trap, from being Christians without hope, who live as if the Lord were not risen, as if our problems were the center of our lives.”
Seeking what is above and not what is on earth will change your priorities. It will change the criteria you use to make decisions. It will change your approach to relationships. It will change your outlook, your mood, your response to whatever life throws at you. You were raised with Christ! Now, take that to work this week.
Let us ask the Holy Spirit to help us be a witness and a model of all that Christ did for us. May we die to self and be guided by the Risen Lord in how we lead and serve others this week.
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.
May God bless you abundantly this Easter Week and may you glorify the Lord by your life. Amen.
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