jeff mikels

For a couple weeks now, I have been dissatisfied with the modern worship songs we’ve been singing in our church. The music is great, the beats are fun, the lyrics are powerful, but honestly, they aren’t very deep.

In particular, the majority of modern rock-style worship music puts God in the second person. Everything is about how great “You” are or about our relationship as humans to “You.” The problem with that kind of music is that it only works for people who have a relationship with God close enough to call him “You.” There are many people for whom God is only “God” or “He” and there are many times in our lives when we need to remember that God is “God” and not just another “You.” » Click here to read the rest. «

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This morning, I was reading the first few chapters of Numbers. I have to be honest with you, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit, I wasn’t expecting much. Aside from a few interesting (and confusing) stories, the book of Numbers is filled with, you guessed it, numbers!

The first few chapters are all about counting the people of Israel. This tribe has 60,000 people. That tribe has 40,000 people. With twelve tribes to go through, the lists of numbers and names of people can get tedious. » Click here to read the rest. «

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Lord in Heaven, I’m sensing your call to take my steps into a new level of relationship with you. It’s more than a desire in my heart. It’s more than a thought or a notion. It’s a repetitive prompting that you have more for me and a constant reminder that I need it.

I’ve washed over it quite often. I’ve filled my life with entertainment, tasks, busywork, meetings, and even family responsibilities because of course those things need to be done, but then when I’m alone in the quiet again, and I allow my soul to quiet down, I sense the lack.

My lack is not a lack of knowledge. Although I know there is much still I have to learn, this next level is one you have already taught me about.

My lack is not a lack of desire. I’ve been longing to go to this next level with you for a long time without actually getting there.

Now, I’m convinced that my lack is not a lack of your willingness to take me to the next level. I’m certain that you have something for me.

My lack is mostly a lack of faith—will I step up onto this new level or not?

What’s holding me back? Fear mostly. What if I step up, and you aren’t there? What if I step up and people I love don’t understand? What if I step up, but I fall on my face because I’m not actually ready?

Lord, I want greater depth with you. Lead me deeply into the waters of who you are. Open my heart to see with the eyes of faith where you are moving, and prepare me for the step to come.

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This is just a quick post to say that I had a really fun weekend on one hand and a really bad weekend on the other.

• At T.G.I. Friday’s (where I just started to work part-time as a waiter), I had a section of two tables only, but in the brief couple hours of lunch, I managed to make over $30 in tips from only $140 in sales. That means I was making people happy and they were tipping me more than 20%. Man that was a good feeling!
• As soon as work was done, I talked to a core member of our church who has decided to go with his wife and kids to another new church in town. He was supposed to be our drummer for the week, so I spent all afternoon trying to reschedule another drummer and plan a time for practice. None of it came together until about 7pm, and I didn’t get back from practice till after 10:30pm!
• Though I got 4 hours of sleep and a late start this morning for church, I prayed and asked God to help me have a positive attitude despite the potential stresses of the morning (our first Sunday in the swanky Holiday Inn downtown.) He answered the prayer by giving me an absolutely incredible worship service for me. I was really sensing His presence at work in me and in the people who came. I felt great about it. (Even though we had some big issues with the sound system and the computer).
• When service was done, I met a man who volunteered to join our setup team for next week!
• But soon after that, I encountered some people who had been completely frustrated by the hassles of today’s setup and tear-down process with a healthy dose of fear regarding the financial future of the church.

All in all, I had a great weekend personally, but I’m surrounded by frustrated people, and I feel responsible for their frustration.

Lord, teach me the lesson you have for me in this quickly so that I can bring some healing and restoration to others and repair some relationships. Give me the ability beyond myself to organize the systems of the church well. And Lord, please meet our financial needs.

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Today’s Accomplishments

• I mowed the lawn.
• I read a chapter from Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time
• I sent an email to Greg, Kyle, and Josh about our Four Guys and God meeting. (We are going to work through the 10 commandments in our discipleship).
• I’ve taken a closer look at the ning.com social network creation site to see if that would work better than maintaining our own church website.
• I processed a few emails.
• I wrote three blog entries.
• I printed mailing labels for 350 postcards and affixed them to the cards (Jen helped).
• I invited some neighbors over for dinner.
• I read the kids their bedtime story and got them in bed while Jen was at Bible Study

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I spent last week doing a productivity experiment that was really just a project of tracking of what I wanted to accomplish and what I actually did accomplish. Though the experiment didn’t turn out the way I had wanted it to, I learned some things about myself, and in this post, I share what I’m hoping to do about it to become more productive in the future.

Here’s my productivity list for last Wednesday (July 24):

• Read about internet marketing — 60 mins.
• Blogged my Monday productivity — 15 mins.
• Devotion and Prayer — 10 mins.
• fix look of blog and add comments — 10 mins.
• Completed survey for research project on church planters — 40 mins.
• Lunch and playing with Charlie — 1.25 hrs.
• Processing voicemail and cleaning out email Inbox (finally) — 3 hrs.
• Phone calls throughout the afternoon — 30 mins.
• Evening phone calls — 60 mins.

(I didn’t even get a list done for Thursday.)

Analysis of the week

At the end of last week and throughout the week, I determined that productivity for me isn’t something I can just willpower my way into. I’m generally a very active person mentally, and my tendency to be distracted means that I’m regularly failing to finish projects all the way. I didn’t even get all my daily blog entries written last week (and it’s already Wednesday of this week!)

All in all, I think it was a good experiment, and I hope that some of the more obvious things I’ve learned will help me be more productive.

Things I Learned

As a result, here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1. Productivity for me will not happen without a list of daily goals. More specifically, as I looked at the list of things I actually did each day, I realized that though many of them were beneficial to my overall ministry, not many of them were essential or high priority items.

2. Productivity for me will not happen in a “distractable” environment. My tendencies toward ADD make it very easy for me to follow mental rabbit trails. For example, reading my email through Gmail leads to me seeing news clips that interest me. Thinking that I can read the story in only a few seconds, I click on the link, but that story will have other links to more information, and before I know it, I’m deeply embedded in open Firefox tabs with a sense that I have to read them all before I can get back to answering that email.

3. The mundane, mindless, routine tasks of ministry are the most dangerous for time-wasting because during those tasks, my brain is allowed to work overtime on discovering rabbit trails. For example, while my weekly sermon is being encoded and uploaded to the Internet Archive, I can do other things with the computer and that usually means frittering.

4. The biggest thing I learned is that the most important tasks on my todo list create a kind of paralyzing guilt that hampers my productivity.

Let me explain that last point. I need to write a sermon every week for church on Sunday. I know that the process of writing a really good sermon takes me about 20 hours, but that I can create a pretty good sermon in only 8 hours. As a result, something very strange happens in my mind as the week moves on.

If I don’t get an early start on my message, I face a daily increasing level of stress as the week moves on. Because I feel so much pressure to get my message done, I feel guilty doing any other ministry. I don’t want to meet with people, I don’t want to make phone calls, and I don’t want to have any meetings because to do any of those things feels like I’m stealing from sermon prep time. If I do some ministry that isn’t sermon prep, I actually feel guilty and unproductive. However, if I put in a 4 hour block of time on my sermon, I feel the logistical pressure of needing to make phone calls, meet with people, and call meetings. So working on my sermon feels like stealing from other ministry.

My problem is that I have no internal sense of process. For me, everything is right now and nothing that should be done should wait to be done. As a result, I simply can never determine emotionally which ministry I should do right now. Make phone calls or work on sermon. Whichever I choose, I end up feeling guilty that I didn’t do the other one. I’ve been this way for long enough that I’ve grown to expect it and anticipate the guilty feeling even before I’ve made the choice and quite often the end result is that I do neither. I escape into family time, reading time, web browsing, email or mindless routine items.

I just spent about 15 minutes browsing the ‘Net to see if there were any blogs that addressed procrastination, but I’m back now!

Strategy for Going Forward

To answer my four learning points above, I’m suggesting this to myself and to you as a possible strategy:

1. Set aside 4 hours each Monday for sermon prep without Internet access with a primary goal of getting draft sermon outlines done 2 weeks before the Sunday they are needed (I want to move this to 4 weeks before it’s needed).
2. Use Sunday afternoon to do sermon podcast stuff until I can recruit someone else to do that for me.
3. While the podcast is encoding/uploading on Sundays, I’ll make calls based on communication cards thus keeping me off the computer.
4. Each day, I’ll make a list of things to accomplish and identify which ones can happen on the computer and how long those will take.
5. BONUS: I don’t think I can make this happen because of the distractability thing, but I’d like to publish my daily todo list to the Internet so that I’ll be more accountable for how I spend my time.

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