review time

I get the privlege of doing the annual reviews on 13 of my employees.

I must say it has been a bigger task than I had intended it to be. I had big illusions of gathering information on them and putting them into a 6 page document. I then present them before the others and explain why I am rating them the way I have. Some have really shined forth, where others have not and are just basically under the radar ... kind of like that one girl off of American Idol that I see but don't remember. At least I don't have anyone like Sunjaya!

Reviewing the accomplishments for one year has been difficult ... I have to make sure I look at all things and not drop anything.

It had me thinking about how I would rate at different categories: believer, husband, lover, dad, friend, worker, minister, teacher, neighbor, son, etc.

Obviously God would be the ultimate judge ... but how would others rate me? Would they see my external actions matching my internal desires/beliefs? How does my wife rate me as a husband, friend, lover, dad, follower of Christ? Etc. How will my children see me and remember me?

Are these things important?

They have to be right? Yes and no.

Yes - in the way that obviously if there is a discord in my actions vs. my beliefs, who are people seeing ... how can they tell which one is me?

No - in the way that I know I am a flawed person that needs Jesus to fix me continually, and therefore I will not be perfect ever and meet anyones desires completely. So why live up to these perceptions of others?

In a former church I ended up not doing things I needed to get done, because I was living to meet other people's desires. This is not good -- if we are all broken, why would we assume that other peoples desires are all good for us? And besides, I mostly did what they wanted to appease/please them ... and make myself look good. We have to seek out God's desires for us ... and there are many to live up to and ALL of them are good!

I ended up doing things outside of the gifts that God had given me. These gifts were given for a purpose, the purpose of ministering to the body of Christ. If I do ministry outside the use of my gifts, then I have a larger chance of doing ministry in my own strength/skills instead of through His strength.

I hope this time around in ministry, God can review my time and see that I was doing more of what He wanted and less of what I wanted.