You all know how to finish the title sentence above, right?
As an undergraduate student at Texas Woman’s University, I had a teacher who was stunning in the way she looked every day. She was dressed impeccably, hair and make-up perfect; she was never in a hurry and never seemed to get ruffled. When she walked into the room I always looked at her from head to toe to see if there was any flaw. She always knew the content she was teaching and presented it well. She seemed so put together in every way that she was intimidating.
Imagine the surprise of our undergraduate sociology class one morning when Miss Porter began the class by saying “Think about this. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.”
Had she finally made a mistake? Had she misspoken? Apparently not because she repeated the statement and added, “Is that good advice? Why would anyone say that?
She wanted some response from us and she got some feedback. Some said it might have been said as a joke or an excuse, or said to provoke an argument. The responses came without giving the statement serious thought and the preponderance of responses was that it was not good advice.
When the input ceased, Miss Porter went on, “Imagine that someone did make that statement and that it was good advice. In what context might that take place?”
Our thinking took a turn and the comments were a bit more thoughtful until we came to a point of seeing that if someone has something valuable to offer another – a product, a program, a proposal, or anything of any kind – it was not necessarily a good thing to wait until you had it perfected.
While some people do shabby work and are willing to put anything forth and consider it “good enough”, there are others who offer nothing because it just is not right yet. They are paralyzed by their perfectionism. Or maybe fear.
Courage to try
The first time we do anything we are by definition doing it without experience. We can get advice from those with experience, we can learn and prepare, and then we try to our best according to the ability we have.
If I think back on every area of ministry in which I have worked, I realize that there was always an element of fear of not being able to do it well when I started out.
When I was a teenager, I was asked for the first time to teach a weekly Sunday school class for young children in an afternoon outreach ministry. I said yes, although I wasn’t sure I could do it. I know I wasn’t a great teacher but I learned from the experience -preparing, presenting, listening, responding, handling a group, and more. The next opportunity to teach was not quite as scary and I found that I liked teaching. The more I taught, the more I enjoyed it.
Many times I heard Joe Ann say to people, “Obey the light you have and your light will increase. Disobey the light and your darkness will increase.” When I said yes to an adult who asked me as a teen to teach, I had no sense that I could do it, but he believed I could. He held out a light and offered it to me. I took it and it was fanned into a bigger light. Eventually, I learned that sometimes God uses the potential others see in us as the light we need to obey.
Responsibility to challenge
As I’ve gotten older, I have also learned that sometimes I need to be the one that recognizes potential in another and offers them that light. Although I was not able to articulate this in the past, I know that I have been doing it without awareness. Now I see that being observant of those coming along and challenging them to do what they think they can’t do is a responsibility I have.
At a farewell celebration for a young woman who was venturing out on a career that was going to take her overseas I overheard an older man say to her, “My wife and I are very proud of you. We saw things in you that made us know that you were the kind of girl who would do something like this.” Her reply, though not accusatory, was a question. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Complimenting the effort
I loved watching Joe Ann work with a music group because she worked for excellence not perfection. When it was time to perform, they performed and she said to them afterward, “You did well for where you are.” It was a compliment that came with a challenge to improve.
None of us will ever go from doing nothing to doing something perfectly. If it is worth doing, we need to be willing to do it poorly to the best of our ability with the promise to keep on trying.
When we make maximum use of what we learn from our experience, it is always better next time. We tweak what needs little adjustments. We add, substract, change, modify, adjust, and more.
Assessing the worth
I read somewhere that when people have a vision for a ministry and decide to lauch it, they should ask themselves if they are willing to stay with it for three to five years. Why? Because it will take that long to establish it to the point it can be handed off to someone else.
When I look back on our years in Slovakia, I see that those things that have lasted beyond us and grown were those undertakings we at first did poorly but found worthy of working at and investing in. Also, the people in whom we saw potential and confronted with their own gifts and emerging abilities, have blossomed.
Now that I find myself at a new time and place in my life, I am asking what is so valuable that I should invest my time, my energy, my material resources, my heart, my life into it? What is so valuable that I will stick with it no matter what happens?
Where do I find my answers? I ask God to give me a passion for what he has for me. Then, I ask for direction and courage to follow the light in that passion. The older I get the more I realize that the new things I find worthy of doing I will do poorly, but I’m willing to keep trying.