Brian Castelli – With His Heart

Last summer I paid a visit to MFUGE (a.k.a. Missionfuge) camp in Charleston, SC. (See http://www.lifeway.com/fuge/mission/) It was a great experience for our whole team. (40 youth plus 9 adults…) I plan to share some of the stories in this space. This is my first installment.

Our youth pastor, Joe, and several others joined a work team that visited a community center in a bad part of town. The building was an abandoned school that had been pressed into service to house a number of children during the day. Conditions were poor, to say the least. Joe reported that the children were using moth balls instead of chalk. There were reports of children licking the moth balls, even placing them in their mouths. Joe also said that some of the rooms were so filthy that he had to fight back nausea when he entered them. The toys that the children had were in poor shape or broken.

At our evening church devotion time, Joe asked if anyone on our team had pocket change that they might consider donating it to help pay for some Dollar Store chalk? Apparently the description of the conditions touched a few hearts. In the end, the “pocket change” added up to $120. Joe took the money and bought chalk, Connect Four, Candyland, Hula-hoops, soccer balls, and other things. Joe brought the goods to his track team leader and told her that they had been donated anonymously.

The children at the community center were thrilled to receive these gifts. They wanted to take them home! Joe confiscated the moth balls, and the children had a blast drawing with colored chalk for the first time.

Perhaps more important than the gifts, Joe’s track leader was inspired by the reaction and enthusiasm the gifts produced. She is now working to get another MFUGE team to come to her site and clean up those horrible rooms.

God has an amazing way of moving and working. When his people have their hearts open to his leading, they can accomplish great things.

I was thinking about the men’s leadership conference that I attended a few months ago.

An important take-away is that leaders aren’t the ones who sit back and complain when there is a problem. It’s the emerging leader who makes himself available to solve the problem. This doesn’t mean that we sweep things under the rug or somehow sugar-coat what’s real. No, it’s more of an attitude. It’s being able to say, “Yeah, this is bad. What can I do to help?”

As I look back on any kind of success that I’ve had in business and in life, I would say that is the attitude that buoyed me, that sustained me through the difficult times and led to tremendous growth. Recently, my son-in-law’s boss changed jobs. In the swirl of uncertainty, I heard a few people advise him to bail out, to find another position – fast! My counsel to him was the opposite. I told him to stand firm through the crisis, to demonstrate his ability to keep on delivering. I suggested that he might want to make it look like his boss was irrelevant – not in a mean way, but as a way of demonstrating his own personal capability and maturity. I suggested that he might want to be seen as someone unruffled by external events. This would be the characteristic of an emerging leader.

New leaders emerge as those willing and available to help solve the problems. Are you an emerging leader?

I’ve been reading the book Humility: True Greatness by C. J. Mahaney. In chapter 5, Mahaney shares his personal strategy for purposefully, intentionally confronting his own arrogance (a.k.a. sinfulness). The first step in the strategy is, “Reflect on the Wonder of the Cross.” This simply means keeping in mind the great sacrifice Jesus Christ, the son of God, made on our behalf.

I have a picture in my mind of the moment a person comes to Jesus and becomes a Christian. It is a moment when the person is on their knees, figuratively, in front of the cross. There are tears streaming down their face as they admit that they can’t do it themselves, that there is no good in them, and that they need a savior. In humility, they shake their head in disbelief over the wonderful (and horrible!) thing that has been done for them.

Have you had such a moment?