A confession, of sorts
It’s no small irony that the Keats and Shelley volume that recently fell into my possession is bound upside-down.
If you see me reading its musty, water-rippled pages, you’ll have a sense of something that’s just not right. But I’ll leave to you to put together what that might mean.
The Shoe
I know how she died.
Her family relayed the details. Witnesses gave me statements.
I’ve been to the scene, read the official report, browsed the news accounts.
And now, I’m reading the coroner’s report. The days these papers skid across my desk are the ones I’d rather not show up for work. I’d like to tuck the report between the manila folds without a glance and just say it contained no helpful information.
When Treasure Holds Us
i.
He greeted me at the door, cell phone to his ear, and motioned me in before walking off to finish his business. I wound my way around boxes that crammed the entry, layers of dust telling me they’d been there for years, untouched.
I squeezed past the kneeler, thinking it awkward there in a room meant for storage. A cloud swirled up from the floor as I slipped through to the dining room, and I wondered if I looked like that Peanuts character. (more…)
Efficiencies
I dug for my phone under the army green flap of my back pocket. Shaking in the cold, my thumb skipped across the screen and missed the Answer button the first time.
Lyla! Are you walking in the ditch?
Knee-deep in sharp brown grass anxious to poke out of South Dakota snow, I looked up at the blacktop above me and had no answer but a sheepish “Umm. Yes.”
A former colleague had driven past moments before on that same asphalt ribbon and spotted me there in the rearview mirror. She wanted to make sure all was well. “Why are you walking in the ditch?” she asked.
Again, I had only one answer: Roadside therapy.
Working on Sunday
He settled into the tall wooden chair at the end of the table. While the rest of us jostled around trying to find our seats amidst the clanging of heavy forks against ceramic plates and the babble of a hundred other people, he pulled the rugged leather out from under his legs and tried to persuade the buckle to hook itself to the strap. He pulled his slender fingers back, letting me thread the strap through the frame, then slid the prong through the hole and grabbed both sides of the belt and pulled hard.
Confident he was strapped in tight, he leaned over in his chair from one side to the other looking past water glasses and purses and menus. His mother reached without looking for the clunky wooden wedge and slid it in front of him. She’s been here with him before, of course.
And she knew he had work to do.
He plucked each of the golf tees out of the block and smiled as he ordered me into service on our makeshift farm here in the middle of a Sunday morning restaurant crowd.
You build fence with me.
When You’re Not From Around Here
Heads turned when we walked through the door, in that certain way heads do when y’aren’t from around here, are you’se?
In the lone cafe in a town of less than 400, the kind of town where the city office closes down once a week for no better reason than that it’s Wednesday, it’s not at all hard to spot the strangers.
It didn’t help, I suppose, that we dropped a stack of files on the table in the checkered-floor fifties-style diner before we even saw the menu. We cranked open a laptop and kept trying to make cell phone calls to schedule appointments where everyone knows that intermittent service really means none at all.
We certainly were not from around here.
View from the Road
Nasty storms and a spate of freak accidents have kept work rolling in the door these days. I’m on the road more than I’m in the office, it seems, leaving me just a little backed up all over the place. This is what I can muster this week.
I do, sometimes — in order to keep my wits those days when I’m to the top of my barn boots wading through loss and wreckage — try to stop and pay attention to the other things. The ones that make me smile or sigh or just stand still a while.
Now and then I’ll even pull over to the side the road and just look and breathe and maybe pull the camera from my gear.
Other times I have to keep moving to my next stop, but the image stays long.
A Day in the Life
Call me if you don’t hear from me again in 15 minutes.
I don’t make a habit of sending texts like that. But on days that start like this, I do.
The homeowner lives out of town and wouldn’t be at his seasonal home when I arrived. So he told me where I could find a plastic bag containing a key.
I dug this baggie out from its super secret hiding place, then brushed off spiders, ants and some other red insect that runs very fast on tiny legs when disturbed. A wriggly fellow was a little more stubborn. And I wondered if he had ingested the key.
It was not in the crawly, slimy, mud caked sandwich bag of treasure.
I tried the side door, just in case it had been left unlocked.
It had.
Under the House
Speaking of really cool offices . . .
The dogs are a couple of show offs. When I pulled in, one was digging at the thawing ground with a paw, unaware of anything but dirt. The other scratched behind an ear, yawned. I took note that the pen was closed before I got out. Not much had changed since the last time.
The Office (because Kelly asked the question)
A little more random than we usually do around here . . .
This is my office.
Kelly just fixed hers up and asked, “What is your office like?“
I was loading my gear for an up-and-down day — checking out a wind damaged roof at one house and slogging through a basement full of water at another. I looked down at my stuff on the driveway and thought, This is what my office is like. (more…)
When Treasure Holds Us
i.
He greeted me at the door, cell phone to his ear, and motioned me in before walking off to finish his business. I wound my way around boxes that crammed the entry, layers of dust telling me they’d been there for years, untouched.
I squeezed past the kneeler, thinking it awkward there in a room meant for storage. A cloud swirled up from the floor as I slipped through to the dining room, and I wondered if I looked like that Peanuts character. (more…)
The Hazardous Work of Discipleship
1969.
That’s what I keep hearing.
I thought 1997 was bad. I remember lying in the back seat looking out the side windows at what seemed like 20-foot walls of snow on either side of the highway while Lane hurtled the car through a blizzard. We were still two hours from the nearest hospital with a NICU, and I was making good on threats to deliver a baby several weeks early.
No, I’m told. 1969 was worse. (more…)
Standing Off with Sheep
I pressed the green Answer button on my phone for what must have been the 47th time in two hours. When I heard his voice on the other end, I settled back in my chair to appreciate a little peace in the wild .
“Heyeah,” he drawled. “Is this that adjuster lady?”
I’ve given him my name a few times. He won’t use it.
But I know his name. And his voice. Spend enough time on the phone with folks, and you can’t help but get to know the voices.
“‘G’mornin’. Is that you, Lester?” I asked.
“Yep, I imagine it is.” He chuckled, and I supposed he shook his head between swigs of coffee. “You comin’ out here today?”
“I sure plan to. Gotta beat the weather.” (more…)
But Dogs Like This, They Do
I pulled into the driveway and stopped the car, getting a sense of the place as I unbuckled my seatbelt. The Risk, as we call a property. Maybe we’ll say Dwelling if we’re feeling a little homier.
Holiday decorations hung askew on the wire fence around the front of the house. Festive.
I caught myself hoping that meant she had a soft side. But a few letters were missing from the season’s greeting. Last year’s decorations. I suspected that festive wore off a long time ago.
Gravel crunched under my soles as I leaned out of the driver’s seat to lace my boots and I let out breath from clear inside them.
She’s an angry one. Angrier than I’ve been dealt in a long time. (more…)
Unfailing
The wind pushed hard here for a few days. Stiff enough to peel roofs down to the paper and blow out window glass and and make a porch wall bulge like an old man’s belly after turkey dinner.
It gave me good reason to unshackle my ankles from the desk chair and get outside. Camera strapped on snug, I drove north. My gaze drifted out to the west and I wondered how a field, shaved to barren stubble, could make me smile. And then to the east, where the rust and amber leaves seemed to whisper I should pull over and nap under them.
I drove on, to the rhythm of my ladder rattling, folded and bouncing in the back.
Dogs Like this Don’t Bark
The dark blue shop coat hangs to his knees, Elton emblazoned white across the left chest pocket. His name is not Elton. A thrift store find, no doubt. It’s a good match to the feed store cap that shadows his face, always pushed groundward by life-burdened shoulders bending low.
He’s scooping ash from his back entry into a pile of debris that changes every day. Seems it grows neither larger nor smaller. He shovels and pushes and rearranges.
But it’s the same black pile of once-was. Can matter, piled just right, become a void?
Redeem This
An extra hand never hurts, so when she offered to hold the tape, I slid the one-inch end over to her behind the bushes. Besides, she needed something to keep her mind busy while we prowled around.
I wondered, as I watched her scale a small pile of debris, if I could come to dread the smell of campfire — that scent that most often means I’m outdoors, with folks I love, and at least for the moment, without a care.
In college, I always resisted washing a campfire-steeped sweatshirt for days, just to hang onto the time a little longer, if only in my head and my nostrils.
She wonders when she’ll stop waking to that smell and remembering it wasn’t a dream.
Yesterday I saw the end of the rainbow (updated)
Seventy-some miles to the south of me, a farmer is looking out the window over his fields and wondering if I’m going to treat him fairly. He’s already told me he doesn’t expect I will.
He knows how we are, being insurance people and all.
Seems a few motherly cattle went looking for their little ones and trampled his corn and beans. We’re rained out here this morning, his dirt road just a little too soft with the overnight storms to let us get close enough to see how much damage these anxious mamas did. So I can’t yet put his mind at ease.
We’re not all bad, I tell him. He’s not convinced.
See the Sign on My Door?
I winced. And then I leaned over, listening for some sign that he was joking to come out of the space three cubicles away.
But his tongue was too busy lashing the employee at his desk to rest in his cheek.
He meant it.
A colleague had come to protest some perceived injustice, and my fellow manager reminded him of his rightful place:
Look at my door. See the sign? Now check the wall outside your workspace. Do you see a sign that says “supervisor”? I didn’t think so.
I drew back up to my own desk, and made a note. Don’t do that. Ever.
::
As a manager, I found myself in a ridiculously unfamiliar place. My background was varied — I’d worked in nonprofits, medicine, retail, IT, education and church ministry. But I’d never worked — or wanted to — in a large corporation.
I’d sold art, built frames, fixed computers, designed websites, managed a network, raised money, and counseled kids. But until a few months earlier, I’d never handled an automobile claim.
Yet there I sat, just a punk, promoted to manage a team of claim adjusters less than a year after I’d started my insurance career. And as though to turn the spotlight onto my lack of experience in the job, the industry and the corporate environment, I found myself responsible for a work group that handled all of the claims for the company’s high-profile global accounts — high-maintenance, demanding clients who were household names around the world and who paid my employer upwards of $15 million a year in premium (just for their auto insurance).
How did this happen? And what on earth was I going to do?
I had to learn fast. So I watched my peers closely, especially the veterans. I studied my own manager. I read a lot of books and articles on leadership and management. And I often reflected on the best and worst of how I’d been led in the past.
Thanks in no small part to the terrific group of folks assigned to me, I soon found myself surrounded by one of the highest performing and cohesive teams in the office. But I have to give credit as well to the managers I worked for and worked with for modeling — the good and the ugly — for me as I sought to find my own way.
I considered these examples (names may or may not have been changed):
Expectations
Karla followed the way of my parents: expect the best. And it worked. Karla always told us that we were the very best in the organization, and the very best in the industry. And while she gracefully worked with us through our mistakes, it was clear she did not expect us to make them. Karla got what she expected: We consistently performed as though we were the very best fundraising and PR staff out there. (I’m still pretty sure we were . . . )
Communication & Caring
Cathi and I were the sole occupants of our office in a small professional education school, my first job out of college. I worked the front desk and she ran the place. Which mostly meant coming in to work and talking to her friends on the phone all day. She did not speak to me most days yet stood in shock when I gave my notice after only two months. “I had no idea you weren’t happy here,” she complained, while I went to work for Karla.
Opportunity
I was underchallenged and Mary Ann knew it. Officially, I did a little data entry, bulk mailings, minute taking and lunch ordering. Mary Ann saw potential, and unofficially slipped me writing assignments, sent me out on photo shoots, set me up with the video producer and had a hand in landing me a gig directing an international tour. I’d have done anything this boss asked of me.
Dignity
My first day on the job, Eddie spelled out my primary duty. “Your job is to make me look good,” he said. I walked directly to my office to doublecheck the job description. Like my colleague who was in love with his title, I found his approach disrespectful and demotivating. I determined that if he looked good in the course of me doing my job well, it would be accidental.
Trust
Cheryl trusted me. She trusted me to do my job well and with integrity, and communicated as much not only through words but through increased opportunity and responsibility. She sent hard work my way, often reassigning problems from other employees to me to resolve. Her trust meant enough to me that I worked doubly hard not to violate it.
Servanthood
Dave taught me the opposite of Eddie. He recognized challenges he could send my way, and always made sure to provide me with opportunities and the resources to exceed expectations. He worked hard to give me every chance to succeed. And whenever possible, he told others about me and my performance. When I needed help, Dave always dug in with me and worked alongside me until we figured it out. Watching Dave I learned to get underneath my direct reports and make them successful — my job was to make them look good.
In my dual-employment life now, I don’t have much manager-employee relationship. In one role, while I do have a manager, I work independently with little direct involvement from her. In the other, I am my own boss.
I’m finding that managing oneself is far different than managing others or being managed.
And I rather miss my managers and my direct reports.
What do you think? What makes a great boss? A bad boss? Share a story?
::
This reflection is posted as part of High Calling Blog’s group writing project on Bosses, prompted by Bradley J. Moore of Shrinking the Camel. Check out the project over at HCB or Bradley’s place.
Photo: Sign Street by Sylvain Plante via Stock.xchng
Becoming Men
I stole down the steps before dawn, crept through the black and reached to the floor to nudge awake the mass of teenager hidden in the blankets. The boys prefer the cool dark of the basement to their own beds upstairs for a good night’s sleep.
“Time to go to work,” I whispered, hoping the other set of slow heaving shoulders wouldn’t stir. He still had a few hours of rest while his brother and I set off for storm work. With two-stories on the schedule, I thought it wise to bring along some extra muscle.
Through the groan, I thought I could make out the words, “I don’t want to do this.”
Yeah, I’m not sure I do either.
But we did anyway.
After a quick breakfast on the run, we bounced down the highway. His head lolled to one side, then the other, as heavy sounds of his sleep sang harmony to the engine’s hum. Karen, as we called the GPS, broke in now and again to berate me for transgressing her route.
I reached to squish a mosquito on the side glass and looked at my boy — this man — his 6’7″ frame folded into the passenger space beside me. I hoped my thoughts weren’t so loud as to wake him. His legs, now longer than mine, crushed into the dash and I reminded myself, You’re not the Lanky Dude around here anymore.
I smiled at the scruff poking out of his chin that he doesn’t feel like shaving now that it’s vacation, and my memory trembled with the reverberations of his man-voice bass tones.
Just the day before, his brother nearly looked me in the eye and demanded a height comparison on the spot right there in the grocery aisle. Sure enough, he’s climbing too, the top of his head now at my eye level.
How long before I’m reaching up to straighten his neck tie before school on a game day or a concert too?
They’ve turned into men on me.
::
The bank sign had flickered 92 degrees as we drove through that sleepy Iowa town. He stood on the ground, as was his job, sweat rolling off his cheeks in the hot stillness and watched his mom crawl and scrape around on a roof that was just a little steeper than I prefer to work.
I marked with chalk and ran my tape, calling out numbers for him to record. Then I felt my foot slip from its place. A footwear malfunction, I called it. The soles just didn’t hold against the loose asphalt granules and I went skidding down the slope.
As I caught hold of a providently placed pipe vent and stopped the slide, I also caught his eye, peeking through the languid green of the weeping willow where he’d sought cover from the baking sun.
Was I about to make him more of a man than he ought to be just yet?
I came down with a burned and bruised backside but wondering, had that vent been on the other slope instead, what I might have burned or bruised in my boy’s tender eyes and heart. For his body might belong to a man. But his insides aren’t ready for all that just yet.
We recovered, and moved on to the next. I’m pretty sure he kept a close eye on me after that, quiet but steady. But he might never admit it.
We drove home back into the early morning, our 700-some miles covered, telling stories and quoting movie lines and dissing each other’s taste in music. We talked smack to the voice that bossed us from the windshield, especially when she rerouted us to a low-maintenance dirt road that terrorized like us an old wooden roller coaster. We laughed and drank Mt. Dew and ate HoHos and Zingers as we recounted the highlights and lowlights of the day’s adventure, mom and son on the job.
I passed by them, sprawled out on the basement floor as I started my day again this morning. They grow bigger, stronger, wiser.
Strange, I suppose. But as I look long at these boys — these men – as I know them a little more every day, it becomes easier to believe that once they lived and grew inside this broken body.
It seems it should become more impossible with each new inch or shoe size or armpit hair.
But somehow, at the same time, it becomes most wonderfully, possibly, possible.
::
Photo: Outdoor Faucet by Charles Thompson, via Stock.Xchng
Share:
I Need Bad Stuff to Happen to You
We may as well get it out of the way right now: I need bad stuff to happen to you.
Your loss, you see, is my gain.
As I sit with Google Maps this morning plotting out a whirlwind tour across northern Iowa (four cities, thirty hours, 901 miles and a lot of carbonated caffeine in a shiny green can), I chastise myself for the occasional quiet wish that misfortune would occur closer to home.
At least as a staff adjuster for an insurance company, I could root for sales reps to sell a multitude of policies on which folks would never have to make claims. In my perfect world you would purchase your peace of mind, but never have to call on us to deliver on the promise of financial security. Besides widespread destruction, major claims events inflate workloads and erase quarterly bonuses in a blink.
We wished for smooth waters, gentle breezes, and no more than BB sized hail.
But now? As an independent contractor I switch channels between Minnesota Twin baseball and the Weather Channel while an occasional Yessss! slips out when the weather starts getting rough.
I only work when people’s stuff gets ruined, or they crash into each other, or somebody gets hurt.
So really, I need bad stuff to happen.
::
Sometimes I feel a little conflicted about that.
Well, a lot of times I feel a lot conflicted about that.
I desire that hard luck not come your way, while at the same time I harbor a (not so) secret need for a steady stream of mishaps and the occasional catastrophe to earn my keep.
I imagine that folks in other professions face a similar conflict once in a while: doctors, mechanics, firefighters, journalists . . . Prevention, maintenance and feel-good stories only go so far to buy baby’s new shoes. Though I’ll admit, I have a hard time picturing any of them wishing ill on their fellow man like I may at times be tempted to do.
Would a funeral director’s thoughts really wander down that road during a quiet stretch? Really?
As I actively trust God to provide for our needs, and know that at least in part that will come through the hardship of others, sometimes the conflict cuts a little deep. (And no, I did not just blame God for the roof that blew off your neighbor’s house. That’s a seminary question for another day.)
Praying for that provision, some days, feels a little funny inside me.
How do we reconcile those kinds of conflicts between our hearts and hard reality in our work?
Here’s the time-tested answer that has served me throughout my claims career: I have no idea.
I really don’t.
I carry on, conflicted or not.
::
On a good day, I know that what I do is a good thing if you’ve just suffered a loss. I can make certain that the insurance company that hired me knows what sort of compensation you’re entitled to.
Sometimes I can even help you feel like you’re not alone in the middle of your disaster. Somebody besides you knows what happened, and how horrible it was, and how much you lost that you can’t get back, and how bad your back hurts and your leg hurts and all the things you’re not sure you can ever do again.
I don’t always have those good days, but when I’m thinking clearly I tell myself, I didn’t make it happen, but I can sure help a person through it.
And that’s a good thing, right?
I can’t control the weather, or drivers, or icy patches on sidewalks that make people slip and fall. And I promise that when I see hope in straight-line winds or a five-car pile up or frozen tater tots falling from the sky, it’s always tempered with the prayer that no one gets hurt and everybody’s premium is paid up.
The bad stuff comes. Accidents happen. Rain falls. Winds blow.
While I get all tied up in knots about how that might profit me, I also remember that since I can say nothing about where and when it will happen, I can work hard to see that my work makes a difference in somebody else’s adversity.
In the midst of the conflict that arises from how I earn a living, the words of Micah help me sort it. For a claims adjuster who wants to sleep at night, they’re really pretty good words.
He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8)
::
Somewhere along the line, we all face that inner conflict of some sort in our work, whether on the job or in our families. Maybe you’re cooler than me, and you don’t wish for bad stuff to happen. But what do you do to reconcile your work and your heart when they don’t get along?
Loving Monday: Unqualified
I wonder what difference it would make if I quit striving to glorify God in my daily work.
What if I stopped using the Bible as the foundation of my business plan or the basis of how I carry out my duties to my employer?
What if I didn’t seek to minister in the midst of my business relationships?
Or stopped looking for avenues for Gospel proclamation while I work?
What if I gave up trying to integrate my faith and work altogether?
What if . . .
. . . What if I just seek first His Kingdom?
Period.
:: (more…)
Loving Monday: Why Family Matters
When mortality comes knocking, it seems always to spur just a little more woolgathering.
On an ordinary day, we might give a passing glance to our mist-like days, numbered few here on earth. But when ends come, even when they’re beginnings, the contemplation grows more into enveloping clouds.
Such have been my days this past week, most of which were spent in the warmth of a century-old farmhouse of a friend as family laid to rest father (and husband and brother and uncle and cousin and friend and neighbor and mentor and colleague and . . . ).
So it comes as no surprise to me that when John W. Beckett tackled the subjects of family, prayer, vision and values in his chapters of Loving Monday this week, the pages of my book flipped back to the chapter on family.
:: (more…)
Loving Monday: What Are We Doing Here?
“Do you ever look back on the day and wonder what we’re doing here?”
Debbie closed the case file we’d been brainstorming and set it on her lap. She leaned back in the side chair and took a deep breath, and then just looked at me in that way of hers. The one with the light smile, knowing eyes. The one that always told me that she knew my struggle.
It was hers too, though it was a fight she fought much better than I.
“You know what we’re doing,” she said.
“I don’t,” I replied. “Not really. Debbie, if I made two lists — one of all the things that make my heart beat and one of all the things I do here every day — and pinned them up side by side on my cubicle wall, it would be a perfect list of opposites.”
:: (more…)
The Conversation