A Vacation Lesson

Woohoo!! My vacation has officially begun!!

Robin, Micah, and I fly to Los Angeles tomorrow morning where we'll spend almost a week hanging out with Robin's family, my family, and all kinds of friends. Next Thursday, we fly to Maui for Robin's brother's wedding where (believe it or not) I'll be officiating! This is gonna be my first wedding! Then we'll fly back to L.A. on the 23rd, and then back to Cincy on the 24th.

So, I'm really excited about my vacation. But here's the weird thing about vacations: it seems like there's so much to do before and after a vacation just so you can have the freedom to take some time off. Hence, I spent several hours in the office today trying to wrap up all my loose ends so that I could enjoy my vacation and not worry about any unfinished business.

One thing that I'm learning (partly through this whole vacation preparation thing) is to delegate. I'm convinced this is one of the keys to good leadership. My personal tendency is to just do something myself because I can do it better and more quickly rather than letting someone else do it, giving them the opportunity to learn and grow.

One of the things I had to do this week was delegate out almost all of the youth events for the summer. I've got "point people" for some of the events, but not all of them yet. But I really believe that for the youth leaders to grow, it's gonna require my inability to do everything--and them discovering that they do have the ability to do some (or even all!) of this stuff.

That, of course, goes for all areas of ministry (or any leadership position, for that matter). A growing, healthy church must learn to share the responsibility for ministry.