Something New

Tonight I am up late learning a new video editing software suite for my online work.  The whole process reminds me what a wonderful pain in the tuckus change is.

When it's done, this new tool is going to save me tons of time and stress over the old way I was doing things.  But even though the old way was arduous, I had gotten used to suffering in that particular way, you know?  I knew exactly the ways the system would be slow, exactly the hiccups and exactly where they'd occur.  It got to the point where I could time other work in between the annoying stalls I'd encounter.  I knew where the system would break down and I learned to take advantage of it!

This new way won't have the disadvantages of the old, a development for which I'm grateful!  But right now as I'm slogging through instruction manuals and trying to find where to drag this and which button to push for that and why my computer is telling me I can't do this other thing...UGH!  Right now it's taking me at least as long to accomplish my task in this new, "streamlined" way as it would have if I had just used the old system.  That's not because the new way is slow, just that I haven't learned it yet.

At this moment I'm experiencing considerable temptation to go back and do it the old way, the way I'm familiar with.  I say this even knowing that the old way is inferior.  The only thing keeping me from putting down the new booklet and retreating is the knowledge that if I do it, the process will never...get...better.  A couple weeks from now I'll be a wiz-bang student of this new system and then my work will fly by.  But if I give it up, that'll never happen.

Isn't this true of most every change, though?  Plenty of times in church we do things because "we've always done them that way".  We forget to examine who our methods, processes, and systems are serving.  We put up with plenty of detours and inefficiencies because it seems like more of a pain to change them than to just make the mistakes we're all familiar with.

But the same lesson applies here too.  The only way forward is to endure the pain of change, to face that fear and soldier onward.  It'll be hard the first couple times you do anything differently.  But walking through difficulties and resolving them without giving up are the only ways of making life better.  Getting comfortable with shortcomings that should be resolved--whether in business, your personal life, or the life of faith--is a road to nowhere.  It looks straight and it's easy to walk, but you're going to be walking that same path 90 years from now not having learned or changed a thing.  In the short term it looks like comfort.  In the long run it's a slow, boring death.

So here I go, back to my instruction booklet and a heavy dose of sighs and groans.  I can do it, I should do it, so I will do it. Wish me luck as I figure it all out.  I promise I'll empathize with you as you walk through the changes you need to make as you move forward in life!  Then we'll do the same for each other as we experience our church changing and growing together.

--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)