Risk Costs, And Pays Dividends!

by Tim Swanson

Right now I have a handful of team members who have really messy lives. These people are going through the kind of stuff that you'd never want to see happen to anyone. When I first committed to praying for the people on my team, I didn't realize that I was diving head first into that messiness.

In my first week as the Music Director at Moon Valley Bible Church, I was handed a list with contact info for thirty volunteers. These were instrumentalists, singers and a/v technicians.  Within my first thirty days of being hired, I sat down to call each person and asked how I could pray for them. My main goal was to interact with everyone outside of rehearsal or Sunday morning. When I started asking how I could pray for my new team members, it just seemed like a nice passive way of getting to know a little about each person.

After a week of calling a few people a day, I had a page with a prayer request for each person. Then it only seemed natural to begin praying for a few people on my team each day. It felt like the right move, but I had no idea what I getting myself into. Before long, I felt the need to reconnect with each person. So I picked a basic interval of time that seemed reasonable to call thirty people. I decided on two months. So I continued by praying for handful of people each day and calling each one within two months off their last prayer request.

Very quickly, people started trusting me with their most painful stuff. I remember one volunteer who told me about her son, who was killing himself with drugs. That's a tragic story by itself. But it was even more heartbreaking that she was caring for her son's two daughters through all of it.  That broke my heart. As I continued to call people, the pages of my prayer journal began to full up with challenging prayers just like that one. As that happened, my prayer time became more emotionally intense each day. I felt their burdens, and my heart broke right along with theirs. that did not make my work week easier.

At that point it was tempting to give up. I had challenges of my own, and my workload was piling up. There were lots of days where it would have been easier to skip my morning prayer time and get on with some more pressing matters. But that's not what I did. I suck it out. I followed through on my commitment to myself to pray for my team.

A few weeks ago I was sitting on my back porch talking with my volunteer's son. The same one who was killing himself with drugs a couple years ago. He told me his version of his story. As he did I was filled with gratitude for the role I got to play in praying for him through all of it. I remembered praying that God would pull him out of life on the street. Then I got to pray for him after he got arrested and the whole time he was in jail. My volunteer kept me in the loop by telling me about his recovery after he got out of jail. I remember thanking God when I found out he had been reunited with his daughters. And I got to listen to him rant about how he was sure that God had saved him from himself. That made all the emotional mornings of praying worth it.

Whatever kind of commitment you make to your team, eventually it's gonna cost you something.  That's risky. But good leadership is risky. Mediocre leaders avoid risk and do what's safe. If you want to be a great leader you'll end up sacrificing for other people. Whether you lead in your workplace or in your home, when you sacrifice for other people, it'll change you. You'll find out that you shouldn't fear risk and sacrifice. The only thing to fear is the mediocrity that comes from playing it safe.  

How can you take risk for the people you have influence with? This week, think about one way you can invest your self in other people. Maybe it'll be something simple like starting to pray for them. But those simple things over time will have a huge impact. And you can make all the difference for someone else.