Over the past year or so, I’ve been seeing a good therapist. She’s a warm, more senior lady who always chats with me while sipping fresh tea (usually apple).
But especially over the last few months, I noticed a hard reality. Because there’s such a demand for care, sessions can be as much as 3 weeks apart — during the holidays, there was a two month gap. So, much of the time wasn’t doing any real work. It was just offering data, catching her up to speed so she could understand. We’d finally get to the present only to find that the clock hadn’t been kind.
It’s not the therapist’s fault. It’s symptomatic of the system. As I sought support for my son and we were bounced around from one provider to another, we found ourselves doing intake after intake. That the providers would need to learn our needs before getting started is understandable, but he got maybe two real sessions in eight months.
And healthcare isn’t the only place this type of inefficiency shows up.
Isn’t that the way many businesses operate, too, with businesses spending so much of their meeting time just getting status updates or painstakingly going through documents that then they have to schedule another meeting if they want to take any real action?
Governments, too, can spend far more hours discussing than they spend doing.
Delay and red tape has been normalized — we might shake our heads and say how ridiculous it is, but we also tell each other that’s just the way things are. The best we can do, we lament, is learn to cope and accept that some things are out of our control.
This isn’t to say that you never can move forward. But it can be horribly frustrating for the progress to be slowed down. Nobody, especially early in a career where ambition is burning its brightest, wants to feel like a snail. The fact that the corporate world paradoxically shouts at workers to do everything fast or lose to competitors, creating enormous amounts of fear-based motivation and stress, is just salt in the wound.
With God, there is no lag
These conditions easily can condition us to expect lag or to believe that real change is going to take a lot of time. If that’s your thinking or attitude, I offer a powerful reminder.
God already knows.
Everything you possibly could need to “explain” or update God about is already filed and understood. The plan or strategy is already formulated. God doesn’t need you to do any kind of rehashing or get Him up to speed.
Will He listen if you want to spew the details? Sure. He’s patient and loving like that. But through Jesus, God’s bought you back the time and the kind of relationship necessary to do real work. You can jump right in and trust whatever change He moves you to take, right now, in this moment. There doesn’t have to be another appointment. You can start with “What do I do?” and He’ll tell you, even if, in His wisdom, the answer is simply “Wait.”
Building a more responsive, lag-free way of working
What would happen if, to honor and be more like God, you found more ways to make the one-on-one or group time you have with others time where you actually can do? Would you be able to achieve more for Him? My hunch is, you would.
If you want an easy place to start, try making meeting materials available prior to getting together with others. Ban words like “review” on agendas and expect others to come to the table prepared.
The key to this is ensuring that people have time built in to process and gain thorough understanding of materials in a supported way (e.g., watching a training video, emailing a dedicated go-to person with initial questions) ahead of time. That, in turn, might require a serious review of the sequences, potential communication hurdles, and tools in place.
Many organizations or groups fail to structure themselves this way. They’re scared to ease up on managerial control and require real accountability from everyone, and they struggle to feel like time to independently think and process will be used wisely and deliver a compounded value. But build the expectation that getting together is for action, even as you leave room for the empathetic, compassionate listening and rest that people need to complete those actions well. If God never leaves anybody stuck, you should do the best you humanly can not to, too.