WHISKEY AND A PIG

Coaching conversations across many miles and time zones often happen in my life before and after the local 9-5 work window.  Many days I am ready to go at 6 am Pacific Time, especially if a client is in Glasgow, where it is already 2!  I had a 4:30 am session one day this week as I shifted my body clock to work across the Atlantic for a bit. Then, once I am in London, there’s this Pennsylvania church that needs to meet one evening after work. Start time: 11:30 pm British Time.

Coffee is a recurring fixture in such meetings.

Since most of my clients are wired as both evangelists and innovators, another theme is their sheer audacity. They bring me such joy.

I asked one client last week what he personally “brings to the party,” in terms of his typical contribution to the ministry teams with which he works. He did not miss a beat. His answer: “Whiskey and a pig.”

He said it, and then moved to another topic.  But I asked him to pause, so that we could return to the whiskey and pig comment. I told him when I go to a party, I take a cheap bottle of wine and maybe a carrot salad. Bringing whiskey and a pig reflects profound generosity, like unto Jesus helping the wine flow at that wedding party in Cana.  It suggests an approach to ministry of not holding back - of “going whole hog”, as my grandparents would say. Pun intended.

Client reflections like this, more than caffeine, make coaching conversations so riveting to me. Even at weird hours.

Since that call, I have been thinking about the ministry leaders whom I have watched thrive.  Innovation requires that some experiments will fail – so they do not always succeed. Neither are they always mystically charismatic.  They are certainly not always appreciated by ministry peers.

But they don’t measure what they give; they don’t hold back like most folks do.  Often they struggle to “turn it off,” since generosity and abundance is in their DNA.

And they often go big.  They bring the party to the potluck in ways that may startle us.  Because they care, so deeply, so fully.

I asked my whiskey and pig client, “How did you become so generous?”  He quickly nailed the answer: a man named Bob, one foster dad on his tumultuous childhood journey. Bob and his wife had 15 children in their home at any given time, for decades. They led many of these troubled kids to Christ. They took in well over 100 foster children. 80 more were adopted.  Eighty legal children – most of them young adults by the time of adoption – with grandkids off the charts.  They took the kids no one else would take.

It is mind boggling: the profound kingdom of God generosity of this couple. And I might add that they were not rich.  They lived in public housing.

Wow, wow, wow!  My coffee got cold on that call. I was mesmerized.

And then later that day, I started naming the people who were so generous with me, who invested in me and encouraged me. Who prayed for me. Who mentored me. For all the Bobs who from their labors rest, who thee by faith before the world confessed…

Over 700 people came to Bob’s funeral, and he was not famous in any way. They were simply the personal beneficiaries of his life’s gospel feast!  Plus spouses and grandchildren!

Friends, without the Bobs in our lives, few of us amount to much. And there would be precious little fruit in ministry.  But because of them, we learn a different way of life, a way that empowers us and others to dare to trust God and to go big.

I am 63 years old.  I have one child and no grandchildren.  Yet more than anything else I can think of, I want to be Bob when I grow up.  I won’t be fostering any children, but I can invest in people.  And I can look at them through the lens of their God-possibilities, and believe in their promise.  And they will feel it.  We always know the people who see more in us than we see.  And our generosity toward them makes a good difference, which will likely be paid forward.  As generation by generation, they inspire others to go big for God.