Tony Morgan asks a great question

Check out Tony Morgan's post today "Lifting people up or loading people down?" Tony, it's not only volunteers we need to be concerned about. Sometimes it's staff.

This issue of work/rest balance in life is resonating with me, particularly in light of the talks by Andy Stanley and Wayne Cordeiro (thanks Tony for the synopsis) at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. I attended the Summit with my whole team, several of whom said Andy and Wayne were talking to me. I needed to slow down, they said. So the next week I took a day off and moved my daughter into her dorm for her freshman year at Park University. That was important, but I have some more resting to do.

It's been a difficult summer:

• We lost a staff person in IT - the 3rd one we've lost this year (and it really hurt)
• We had the usual vacations
• I had the most unfortunate experience of passing a kidney stone
• We hosted the Willow Creek conference
• We've had emergency outages in our phone service and our database server (which hosts Shelby and Track It)
• We've had a number of major infrastructure projects going on including new firewall, new web content filtration system, new anti-virus software, new phone company, new online bookstore, new online box office, updated web site navigation, and the biggest of all, our new location - Resurrection West
• And all of this is on top of our routine workload of tech support, computer upgrades, new staff coming in, and on and on

We simply haven't been able to keep up.

So Tony, I'm with you. As one of the burdened, I'm wondering if sometimes we're adding to the burdens of our congregants, volunteers, and staff. If they've had a summer anything like mine, they're ready for some rest. Yet others are ready to take the next step if only we will challenge them. We need wisdom to know when to push and when to relax.