Guest Post: Peace and Fly Smart

Today’s guest post is by @lshallenberger. Some great advice from a humble guy. Enjoy.

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It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with children, youth, Next Gen, Family Ministry and whatever you folks are calling yourselves this week. It feels right.

I’m at the same church, but doing family ministry, adult ministry, and trying to prove that adults don’t learn much differently than kids do. On really fun weeks, Jess, my successor, lets me have the keys to the kids’ wing when she vacations.

I offered to write this post because I miss you all. Who doesn’t like hanging out with rock stars. Let’s not lie to ourselves: You have some of the toughest jobs in the church. The complexity of what you do every week could drive Bill Gates to develop a tic.

It might not be quite that bad. Sorry for the hyperbole.  Let me try again.

You are Atlas, Michael Jordan, Reggie Joiner, Sue Miller, and a bag of chips. You do your job like a boss.

But listen, with great power comes great responsibility. And just like there’s no shame in plagiarizing Spiderman there’s no shame in you paying attention to your soul care.

I didn’t.

I’m coming out of a long, deep funk and I’m beginning to feel like a human being again.

That’s what happens when you fly too close to the sun.

Me? I’m Icarus, the character in Greek Mythology who flew close to the sun. You’ll recall that his wax wings melted and he tumbled back to the earth and crash landed. A cautionary tale, for sure.

If you’re like me, you’re prone to take too much on (Like agreeing to guest post on two days’ notice. C’mon, Larry, grow up). The Greeks called my issue “hubris”, a self-destructive drive to be bigger than you are. My wife, accountability partner, and my therapist all have varying names for it. You can imagine.

The Greeks had a name for stories where hubris drove heroes like rented sports cars. Those stories were called tragedies.
Lucky for me, God tells a better story.

Fast forward from my hard landing to today: I’m getting my wings back and it feels good.  I’m hard-wired to fly and fly high.  So I know that I’m going to be flirting with the sun again, in spite of myself.

Here’s three questions that I hope to be asking myself the next time I fly:

• Why am I flying?
• What’s the source of my wind?
• Who do I trust to catch me when I fall again?
• When is the last time I’ve inspected those wings?

Ladies and gentlemen, fly. Just be smart about it.

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Larry Shallenberger is a pastor and the author of Lead the Way God Made You. He’s currently writing a young adult novel about Icarus. He hopes you get the chance to read it someday.