Seeing the big picture

I’m one of those annoying people who have to know the intended outcome of something before I start working on it. I have to have a goal, to be able to visualize the goal line.

I don’t really understand how folks can be comfortable starting something, not knowing what it is they want to have accomplished by the end. But that’s just how I’m wired.

Here in AZ we’ve got about five weeks left in the semester, and I’m already pouring over the data that I’ll need to work with to ensure that next year gets off to a banging start.

As our school’s English department chair, I have to figure out how to best utilize the strengths and weakness of my staff to ensure their success and that of their students in my course scheduling. 

I’m also revising our supplementals  allocation, (fancy words for decidng who gets to teach what literature) so that we stop poaching on each other’s materials and making each others’ lives unbearable when we have to endure the whined, “but we read that already!!” (the horror!)

I’m also thinking about goals, the things I want us to do differently, the things I want us to keep.

I’m doing all of this, and its the end of my FIRST ever semester in an ‘administrative position’ (my dpt chair stayed home to have a baby, and may not be coming back!)

Well.. it just got me to thinking, how often do we as Christians spend time thinking of ‘the end of our race?’

We start our walk with Christ, and have a very ‘take one day at a time’ mentality. We tend not to think of how what we’re doing, or not doing will be brought to bear when we stand before the judgement seat of Christ.

I’m not thinking so much of a condemnation session, as a award session, (for there shall be therefore NO condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus) and of how living our Christian lives with the big picture in mind might in fact help to change the way we live.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say to the Lord, that we’d had a plan in the way we walked our christian walk? Wouldn’t it be nice to identify the individuals with whom we had shared the ‘good news’? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that we had found ways to honor and not bring shame to the name of Jesus?

Maybe if we spent a little more time thinking about what is waiting for us at the end of this journey, we would be a little more careful about how we make it.

His Handmaiden.