You have discovered you have fifteen minutes to live. What story has to be written?

So I started the timer, per my assignment, and I have 15 minutes to write the story that has to be written.

OK here goes!

Obviously this has to be my story.  The story that I would want to be told about my life.

I have discovered in my heart and in my life that often, there are things I want to do and I simply don't pull them off.  I do what I don't want to do and find myself frustrated with who I am.  Over the last fifteen years, I have been building a business.  I have been at work growing the business and growing the people in the business. Through that time I have experienced an incredible story that goes like this.

I graduated college in 1983.  During my final few years of college many of my friends felt a "calling" to be pastors and evangelists.  Several of them quit secular college and went to the small bible college that was forming in the church I attended.  As I watched them do this I prayed to God about what my calling was and felt that my answer was to work.  To finish my degree and go into the "world" with my degree and pursue what work had to offer. But I felt with this call that the work I was to do, was not to simply be for my benefit and my comfort.  I was not to simply get a cushy job that I could perform with low stress and enjoy life.  But I had been given a gift, I was very smart and engineering classes were pretty easy for me.  So I felt a calling to maximize what I did with my gifting and at the same time I felt called to be a member of this particular church I was in.

As I graduated college, we were in a terrible recession and there were not many jobs to be had.  I was offered two jobs in other cities.  But I felt that God had asked me to stay in the city I was in, in the church I was in, so I turned them down.  I remained unemployed for the next nine months.  Taking odd jobs, painting houses and cleaning buildings.  At one point I was cleaning a bathroom that had been flooded with soot from a sprinkler leak in the attic.  I was scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush, and kept my head down in shame because I was crying that God would not give me job in this city where I felt he had wanted me to stay.

Fast forward thirteen years and I had found employment, learned the mechanical construction industry and left the company I was working for the last ten years to buy into an engineering business that also wanted me to start a construction company for them.  Four years into this venture, we found ourselves under a large amount of debt and almost on the verge of bankruptcy.

One of my partners thought the failure was due to someone in the company sinning.  My rejection of that idea has become the story I must tell.  I raised my hand and said in that meeting, I'm a sinner.  I sin, I fail and I do not think that God works that way such that my sin is the reason this company is failing.  Will I take all the glory myself when we succeed?  Will my success be because I no longer sin now? 

As I rejected that philosophy, and separated from that partner, I began to see that everyone was and is a sinner.  Those that don't think they are have simply rated sins from 10 being bad to 1 being not so bad, and then rate themselves as good because they have not committed sin numbers 8, 9 and 10.  But they actually don't count 1 through 7.  We call these people self-righteous, judgemental, fundamentalists and finally hypocrites.

As I began to acknowledge my sin, I began to see those around me be more courageous to see their own imperfections, and as this happened, the team I was leading, my company along with my partner, grew closer together, we were able to have more difficult conversations, tackle more and more issues with how we did work and we began to prosper.  I am embarassed and delighted by how much money I have made over the last ten years of my life.

This story has led me to write in this blog, with the intention of writing a book on leading like a sinner.

My fifteen minutes are now up, but I hope my story has conveyed hope to those who know in their hearts that they are not perfect.  Hope that perfection is not required to have a great story.