Challenges/Joys of Starting & Leading a New Organization

Ever since Lemonade International hit the one year mark in late March I have been reflecting a lot on the challenges and joys that we have experienced in the past year. It has been incredibly rewarding, but there have been some definite challenges along the way. Here's some of both from my personal experience.

I'll start with the challenges:

Time. It takes a lot of time to start an organization and a lot of time to move it forward in the early days. When I left my previous job I had a few people ask me if this new work would keep me busy for 40 hours a week. My response has been that it is hard to keep myself from working 70 hours a week. This is something I am passionate about and it's tough to pull away and create boundaries. There have been many late nights on the laptop and on the phone with our friends in Guatemala.

Money. While I knew it was a huge risk financially for me to leave my job last year to do this work full-time (when it didn't make sense on paper to do so) I wasn't prepared for the amount of focus I would personally have to invest in fund-raising for this work. I really don't want to be perceived as the guy who is always asking for money, but it has become clear very quickly that it takes money to keep moving this work forward. Even though I feel like we live fairly simple lives nothing stresses me out like money. It doesn't stress me out to raise funds for the direct work we are doing in Guatemala, but it is a very real challenge for me not to be stressed out about whether or not I'll be able to draw a paycheck in order to provide for my family.

Staying organized. There are so many dreams in my heart for expanding our work in La Limonada (e.g. microfinance, community development projects, specialized music and arts programs for the kids), but as it is with anything new I find myself focusing so much of my time playing catch-up. I concur with what @ericbryant posted on Twitter today, "I really want to increase the amount of time per day that I'm creating rather than reacting". I am adamant about responding to emails within 24-48 hours and it's easy to have four hours go by just doing that.

Now for the things that bring joy:

Devoting my life to something I am passionate about. It is exciting to get up each morning knowing what I do with my time is making a direct impact on the lives of the people of La Limonada. So may of them have become our friends and it is so energizing to know that what I do is helping to change lives. I thank God for giving me this opportunity.

Working closely with my wife. While I know this type of arrangement doesn't work well for everyone it has been so great to work so closely with Cherie. Somehow I was blessed with a wife who is so great to be around. She does so much to help Lemonade International to be a really solid new organization. Along with being an incredible mom to Ben, Alex and Miyah.... she works tirelessly managing our child sponsorship program and our donor database.

Working with a great team. Cherie. Leah. Donnie. Kate. Tita. Monica. All incredible people with huge hearts for God and for the people of La Limonada. These people inspire me every day to keep pushing forward with what God has put on our hearts to do.

Meeting incredible people along the way. In just over a year we have had the opportunity to meet some great people. People we didn't know a year ago have become close friends. God has brought us together through a mutual love and compassion for the poor.

Getting close to the heart of Jesus. Regardless of your religious background or worldview you have to admit that the poor and marginalized were closest to the heart of Jesus. And as someone who desires to follow him with my life it has been a great journey to work closely with people who are closest to his heart. When you get close to the poor you really end up learning so much more from them than you could ever teach them.

These lists really do ring true. The things that bring joy really do outweigh the challenges. That fact doesn't minimize the challenges when they are staring me in the face, but it does provide strength to push through them.

Philippians 3:14 "I press on toward the goal to win the prize
for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

A Re-Jesus Re-View

Re-Jesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch is the first of (I hope) many titles I will read and review for The Ooze Viral Bloggers.

Frost and Hirsch pull material from their former collaborative effort, The Shaping of Things to Come and personal works, Exiles (Frost) and The Forgotten Ways (Hirsch) by reminding individuals and church communities not to forget that Jesus needs to be at the center of our mission.

Throughout the book they sound an alarm to the reader that Christianity's focus is Jesus. But they also creatively reveal that there have been many "pictures" (in some cases literally) of Jesus that have shaped not only our view of him but our living out what we think it means to be a follower of him (see Chapter Four: "Bearded-Lady Jesus, Spooky Jesus, Ordinary Galilean Jesus).

For the individual they claim:

"...it is time to recover a vital and active sense of Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us, the life he laid down for us to follow. His passions and concerns must become ours."

For the church community:

"...we believe that the church must constantly return to Jesus to find itself again, to recalibrate, to test whether we are indeed in the faith. The inference is that by and large the church as we currently experience it in the West has to varying degrees lost touch with the wild and dangerous message that it carries and is duty bound to live out and pass on."

While there are times that the book slips into more theological terminology than I was prepared for it is not simply for the audience of pastors and church leaders who will inevitably make up it's primary readership. All followers of "Jesus" (I intentionally used quotation marks because for some we may at times be following a different version of him) would receive a much-needed challenge to recalibrate our lives to the life and message of the true Christ revealed in the Gospels.

The straight-forward, no-holds-barred, yet conversational approach Frost and Hirsch take is the kind of jolt the church needs today. Where in many cases our "creative" and "relevant" sermon series packaged in TV show titles, our American Idol-looking stages, our trendy-dressing pastors, our Starbucks coffee-serving cafes and even our recent adoption of social/global issues have become the focus... we need to be reminded that:

"...we can hold up the models of church we find around us today... against the example found in the Gospels and the New Testament, and we can ask some serious questions about the disjunction we find there. It is time to recalibrate the church around the person of Jesus rather than around marketing ploys developed for a shallow consumeristic age."

Some find books like this to be attack on the church or look at those who say such things to be "anti-church". Frost and Hirsch provide a response to this that needs to be heard:

"...we have presented some rather pointed criticism of the way church is being done in the West. This has riled some readers and led some critics to suggest that we don't love the church, but we submit to you that it is our very love for the church that motivates us to write what we do. And besides, there is a difference between liking the church and loving the church the way Jesus commands us to. To be sure, we do not like gatherings of strangers who never meet or know each other outside of Sundays, who sit passively while virtual strangers preach and lead us in singing, who put up with second-rate pseudo community under the guise of connection with each other, who live different lives from Monday to Saturday than they do on Sunday, whose sole expression of worship is pop-style praise and worship, who rarely laugh together, fight injustice together, serve the poor together, eat together, pray together, raise each other's children together, serve the poor together, or share Jesus with those who have not yet been set free... But if it's a family of Jesus followers striving, no matter how inadequately, to be Christlike, holistic, peace-loving, worshipful, devoted, graced, holy and healthy then we will love it with every ounce of physical and emotional strength we have."

Re-Jesus is a glaring reminder for us to live a Jesus-centric life and for our church communities to be Jesus-centric in all we do. As followers of Jesus we have to believe that if we desperately cling to the Jesus of the Gospels we will be changed, our church communities will be transformed and the world around us will be moved forward in the redemption process in distinctly evident ways.

The Future Of Work

While taking my son, Ben, for a haircut this afternoon the latest issue of Time jumped out at me as I sorted through the stack of magazines on the table in front of me... as I frantically looked for something male-oriented (ESPN The Magazine, US News & World Report) to pass the time.

This particular issue of Time grabbed my attention because of the title on the cover, The Future Of Work, and the creative corresponding photo. For the first three years we have lived in Raleigh, NC (it's hard to believe it's been four years now) I worked as a recruiter and then a branch manager for Kelly Services, a fortune 500 company and a global leader in temporary staffing and outsourced human resource solutions. In my time there I was trained to be a student of the ever-changing job market and the state of employment in our city and beyond.

Even though that's not the world I am in today I still have a special interest in the shifts that are taking place in the workforce.

The feature story in Time addresses "Ten Lessons For Succeeding in the New American Workplace", and covers a wide variety of issues such as technology, corporate integrity, benefits, the absence of the traditional "corporate ladder" climb, the increasing influence of women in the workforce, and my favorite "The Last Days of Cubicle Life", which is written by Seth Godin the author of the best-selling book, Tribes (side note... I highly recommend watching the video below of a lecture given by Seth Godin).

I think corporations, organizations, churches, employers and employees would do well to be students of the shifts taking place in our world today. It's almost a necessity to recruit, retain... and more importantly to engage in meaningful relationships through the work we do.

From the cover of Time magazine:

"Throw away the briefcase: you're not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won't look much like your old one. There's no longer a ladder and you may never get to retire, but there's a world of opportunity if you figure our a new path."

What are your thoughts? Maybe it's time for you to pursue that new path?

Heading Back to The Land of Eternal Spring

While I have been back to "The Land of Eternal Spring" a few times since then... it has been since February of last year that Cherie and I have been in Guatemala together.

We are really looking forward to reuniting with Leah, Tita, the teachers, the kids... and Jocelyn and Suzy (the two girls in the photos above that we have been sponsoring for the past five years).

It was shortly after that trip that we followed our hearts to devote our lives to the work we felt God calling us to do there. A month after returning Lemonade International began and we moved into a new phase of our lives that has been somewhat of a whirlwind since then.

The book, The Barbarian Way, by Erwin McManus has been instrumental in encouraging us to step out into the unknown and to take risks (that don't necessarily make sense) and to give our lives in partnership with our Guatemalan friends to serve the people of La Limonada - an urban slum community of between 60,000 - 100,000 people.

Here are some quotes from that book:

"True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom."

"A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. If we wait for someone else to take the risk, we risk that no one will ever act and that nothing will ever be accomplished."

"If you chose to make the insane decision to live your life for the sake of others, if you chose to follow the One whose barbarian path led him to the brutality of the cross, and if you embrace his invitation to take up your own cross and follow him, then it has begun. If you dare to allow God to unlock your primal spirit, He will unleash the raw and untamed faith within. Then you will know you have chosen the barbarian way out of civilization."

It still seems crazy to me at times that this is the path our lives have taken, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm thankful that God has directed our lives this way... and thankful that I get to serve Him together with my wife and our friends.

More to come from this blog and from the Lemonade Int'l Blog in the coming days...