FredMcKinnon.Com

Hey Everybody -

Hope you had a great weekend.  I wanted to chat about leadership today, and how we can apply it in ministry, in worship leadership, or even in business.  It’s about celebrating our victories.

We discussed this at length in staff meeting at SSCC this morning.  It seems that our tendency in “meetings” is to come together and discuss problems, errors, issues, and how we can best fix them.  Whether it’s a church staff meeting, a praise team meeting, a band gathering, etc … so much of our time is spent communicating what we “can be doing better”.

I’d like to challenge you to take some time this week and “celebrate the victories” with your staff and with your volunteers.  One testimony of a changed life can float someone’s boat for weeks.  One story of a person who was blessed and encountered God during our Sunday service can boost the entire staff up a couple of notches in their passion and motivation to serve.

Let’s face it.  We all like to see fruit from our labor.  But how many times to we stop and actually savor the fruit?  How many times do we slow down enough to see the progress we’ve made instead of focusing on the grueling road ahead of us.

When I was a teenager, I spent a few hot summer days in a Middle Georgia watermelon patch.  It was so hot you’d nearly pass out … especially if like me, your body wasn’t yet accustomed to the physical labor of throwing 50 pound “jubilees” onto the back of a trailer being pulled by a tractor … or worse, stacking those watermelons in the trailer of an 18-wheeler with no A/C, in 100-degree heat with 100% humidity.

On those days, the work was hard.  However, a couple of times per day someone would always “drop” one of those jubilees onto the ground (accidentally of course, haha!), splitting it open, yielding the sweet, refreshing, juicy heart of that melon for all of us to dig into.  We’d stop for 15 minutes, dig our dirty hands into that watermelon and enjoy the fruit of our labor, and celebrate how good it was.

That 15-minute break would be enough to inspire us to pick up, crank up, and keep walking.  And by stopping and celebrating our victories in the midst of our work and ministry, we too can be inspired to press onward.

I hope you will join me this week in taking some time to celebrate the victories you’ve seen over the last few days, weeks, and months.  If you can’t see any victories, you aren’t looking for them.  They are there.  Just ask around.  And when you hear a great testimony – don’t keep it to yourself.  You’d be amazed how much your team NEEDS TO HEAR that what they are doing MATTERS.

Wanna share some of your victories here?  Go for it.

Fred