Do we really need to do more?

Some time ago, I prayed one of those prayers that you probably shouldn’t pray: I wanted to do more. I wanted to be enabled to do more. I wasn’t satisfied just doing what I was already doing.
Yes, I prayed in His name. Yes, I said it was for the Kingdom of God that I wanted to do more. Well, you know what people say about prayers like that: be careful what you ask for.
I remember well maybe six months ago my pastor preaching I think on a Wednesday night and saying there were two things you don’t pray for: patience and humility. Well, to show you how dumb (you can fill in other adjectives if you want) I can be, I thought to myself I could well use a dose of each. Within a few days I had a significant lesson, a speeding ticket while on the way to a church function. It was the first speeding ticket I had gotten in fifteen years!
If the first lesson didn’t take, I got a second lesson, another speeding ticket maybe two months later. Talk about patience and humility!
One of the things I stress is efficiency. I believe one of the great strengths of our American economy is our growth in productivity. We are doing more with less. With computers, I know our newspapers are much more efficient.
Despite publishing more pages than we did four years ago, our work hours are not that much different. For example, processing photographs a few years ago was a long process where we made photo prints, turned them into dot patterns for reproduction making negatives of the prints, and we physically had to cut out photo negatives and tape them into the page negatives that the press plates were made from. Making color photographs was a much more involved and expensive process.
The physical handling time to process a single photograph a few years ago in most newspapers was probably ten minutes each, not to mention the drying times for the prints and negatives. Oh, and that doesn’t count the time to develop the film the photo is on, and the time to go through and find the prints that you use, and the time wasted on prints that looked pretty good on the negative but don’t come out when you get them off the film.
Today, I can “process” a photo in a minute. With digital cameras, there is no film processing. Everything is done in the computer with Photoshop. It goes from our computer to their computer over the internet, and on the other end, that computer spits out a printing plate. That printing plate prints a better looking paper than we were able to produce with a lot more time and trouble and money just a few years ago. Praise God!
I love my cell phone as another example. It has a calendar function, to remind me of places I need to be. I can call people while I drive down the road (I’m trying to give that up) or while I’m waiting for something else to happen. It helps me get more accomplished.
There is something else, though. My wife regularly preaches to me about it. I know that I am able to do more, I am able to get a lot accomplished. I feel good about that.
But there is a price to pay.
I went to a photo assignment recently. Other staffers went to similar photo assignments at the same time. I covered the basics, got it done, and got back to other things; I moved on to do more.
One of our other staffers, Sarah Wise, got what I saw as an outstanding photo. The others on the staff will tell you I am hard to please, so this is no faint praise.
She took more time. She was more patient. She wasn’t more concerned about moving on to something else. She did a better job on the assignment.
Eight months ago, we hired an office manager in Princeton, Lucy Brower. I told Lucy I would delegate things to her and to scream when I gave her too much. Lucy is a lot like my wife, and worries too much about things, but like Marilyn, she gets a lot accomplished. I’ve seen her on more than one occasion wring her hands, but she has yet to scream about too much. Frankly, she’s taken on more than I would have thought she could do, and she’s done what she does well. Very well.
Forgive a little fatherly pride here, but my two daughters have come to work at the paper this summer. My older daughter (I still see her as my little girl), Ashley, has stepped in to put together the two papers with scarcely a ripple. I wanted to take some of the responsibility, and thought I would need to. I was wrong. It has been seemless, and I know in her own ways, she has improved the paper.
My baby girl, Kelly (and she’s growing up into a fine young woman), wanted to help make photos this summer, and she has helped fill in for vacations in some other areas. Kelly has also taken some photos which have been outstanding. She has been more patience and perhaps been more creative in her photos than I probably would have been.
I believe in excellence. I believe we serve a most excellent master, and we are called to serve in excellence. We reflect Him when we serve in excellence.
As Jim Collins says in “Good to Great,” good is the enemy of great. Settling for good keeps us from greatness.
I recently preached on Martha and Mary. As I told the congregation of that little church, I needed the lesson probably more than they did, and I keep learning.
Like Martha I want to do more, thinking that makes me worthy. Unlike Mary, I can lose focus on the important things, the priorities.
Do you really want to do more?