How I Came to Social Media

It was work that originally led me to sign up for Twitter and other social media platforms. For a number of years, social media became my work. Even when I retired, I was still managing the company’s social media platforms. 

From 2003 to 2004, I spent nine months working in communications for St. Louis Public Schools, which was in dire straits. Enrollment had declined to an official 40,000 from a peak of about 100,000, and the district was still operating school buildings, a headquarters building, and an administrative staff that supported a 100,000 enrollment. A management firm was hired by a reform school board to take over and do the painful stuff that had to be done. The management firm was in place all of two days when it discovered that the district was bankrupt.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Sara Kurfeß via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

R.E. Lee, the father: Great tickle fighter and more – JoAnna McDonald at Emerging Civil War. 

 

How Normandy Remembers the Only U.S. Military Chaplain Killed on D-Day – Blake Stilwell 

at Military.com. 

 

Book Notes: Union General Daniel Butterfield – Civil War Books & Authors. 

The Story of the Second Chance

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran, courtesy of my mother. I was raised with a strong Protestant work ethic, courtesy of my father (who was himself raised a Southern Baptist). Both of those influences fused me into something of an overachiever, although only for those things where I felt I had a chance to overachieve. Academics were one area. Sports were not. 

Until my senior year in college, my life followed that overachiever pattern. Set goals, achieve them, surpass them, and then set new goals. As a college freshman, I set several goals, and kept adding to them. 

By the middle of my senior year, I had achieved or overachieved everything. All the positions, honors, accolades, recognitions – I had captured them all, including being the managing editor of the student newspaper for my final semester – the position that ran everything in the paper except the editorial page. I had the power position on the paper, likely as powerful as any student office on the campus.

Nothing was left. Nothing. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

An Umbrella and a Bible

I look around my office at work, and all that’s left is an umbrella and a Bible.

Today is my last day of work at the day job. It’s a strange feeling to be looking straight in the face of retirement.

We’ve been planning this for more than a year. It takes a lot of work to retire – all of the things that have to be lined up, including at least some thoughts as to what I’ll be doing after tomorrow. Retirement is a cultural concept, not a biblical one. Abraham tended flocks until he couldn’t tend them any more.

I will continue to work. It will just be different. Less structured. Less routine. Less hectic. Less crazy. Less crisis-ridden. The article I wrote for The High Calling this week summed up what my working life has been like.

I told the company last June. I nailed down the date in January. The planning and work have been intense at times. This is where my ask-every-question-and-then-some wife steps to the fore. We’re able to take this major step in our lives because she is a wise, capable woman who planned for our future. My wisdom came solely in heeding what she said.

I had planned to work longer, but a number of different things happened, and by last March, the path forwarded became a lot clearer than it had been.

My office has slowly been stripped rather bare. It helped that our offices were reconstructed, and I moved from an office to a half-office and then to a cubicle. Files have been sorted. The computer has been largely emptied. Documents have been transferred. I have two messages left in my email inbox, both reminders to do something. Personal items have been taken home.

Left on the walls are two posters for Tweetspeak Poetry’s Poetry-at-Work Day (one for 2014 and one for 2015) and a poster for National Poetry Month. I’ve turned in my iPad, stripped back to factory standards, with my phone and computer to follow shortly.

I will miss the people. I work with good people on our Digital Team. I have two good people reporting to me. I’m leaving our social media channels in good, competent hands. I’ve also arranged for ongoing management of the corporate archives – a small part of my job but one that’s interesting and often important. (I’ve often joked about being responsible for the “alpha and omega” of the company – the social media channels and the archives.)

Do I have plans? Yes, absolutely. It will be a different life, but it will still be a full one. I’ll continue to work with The High Calling and Tweetspeak Poetry. I will likely find myself doing some babysitting with the grandsons. I will continue to write fiction and poetry, and I want to do some volunteer work. I may even do some freelancing.

So it’s not exactly retirement as commonly perceived. (And I don’t play golf.)

So today I will attend a few scheduled meetings and have lunch with the digital team. At some point in the afternoon, I will get my Bible and my umbrella, and walk to my car.

It will be good.

Faith at the Firing Line

At the end of this week, I’ll be retiring from my day job, and I’ve been looking back at some thirty-seven years in corporate communications.

Most of my work has centered in the oil, chemical, and agriculture industries; none of them lack controversy or crisis. My career has largely been spent on the firing line.

At times, it felt like the firing squad.

Government and regulatory issues. Environmental problems. Product crises. Transportation accidents. Public protests. “He said/she said” litigation. Even the short time I worked in a non-corporate environment for the St. Louis Public Schools, it was much the same. There, I dealt with restructurings, school closings, layoffs, protests at school board meetings, and teacher sick-outs.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Photograph by Any Bay via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Story of the Second Chance

I was raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran, courtesy of my mother. I was raised with a strong Protestant work ethic, courtesy of my father. Both of those influences fused me into something of an overachiever, although only for those things where I felt I had a chance to overachieve. Academics were one area. Sports were not.

Until my senior year in college, my life followed that overachiever pattern. Set goals, achieve them, surpass them, and then set new goals. As a college freshman, I set several goals, and kept adding to them.

By the middle of my senior year, I had achieved or overachieved everything. All the positions, honors, accolades, recognitions – I had captured them all, including being the managing editor of the student newspaper for my final semester – the position that ran everything in the paper except the editorial page. I had the power position on the paper, likely as powerful as any student office on the campus.

Nothing was left. Nothing.

I crashed and burned.

I kept working; the work ethic was too strong for that to stop. But I crashed. Everything I had accomplished seemed meaningless. Everything I had done seemed like wasted effort. Meaningless. Chasing after the wind.

What I didn’t know was that I was careening, wildly careening, right into the arms of God.

Through what seemed a strange series of circumstances, I landed one night in a conversation with the director for my college’s Campus Crusade for Christ chapter. I was angry, believing that I had been taken advantage of by this man’s organization, which seemed to preach one thing and practice another.

We talked, possibly for hours. I don’t remember how long. But by the end of our conversation, I found myself in God’s arms. I had become a story – the story of the second chance.

This wasn’t an opportunity to reinvent my life. This was a transformation of my life. In a matter of minutes, I understood that everything had fundamentally changed.

About 11 p.m., I found myself in the newspaper editor’s office. He was working late. He asked me if I was okay. “Has something happened?” he asked. And I nodded. “Everything happened,” I said. “Everything. And I can’t explain it.”

The story of the second chance didn’t begin and end that night. If I have learned anything about my life, it’s that the second chances keep coming.

Fourteen years after that night, I had a career crash and burn. Same pattern of overachievement; same result. It happened again 10 years after that, and then 11 years after that.

And each time brought an opportunity for a second chance.

I can say this: had not that second crash and burn happened, I would not have written a speech that changed an entire industry.

Had not that third crash and burn happened, I would not have spent nine months as the communications officer for an urban school district in extreme crisis, learning that a lot of people think differently than I do and they all don’t live in nice, comfortable suburbs, and that some of their children attend schools with 110 percent turnover – annually.

Had not that fourth crash and burn happened, I would not have had published two novels and a work of non-fiction. I would not be a weekly columnist on poetry. I would not be an editor and writer for The High Calling.

Four stories of second chances. And each time, something changed, something was learned, and something was realized.

Something was being grown inside of me.

What was growing, what is growing, is less of me.

The High Calling has a community linkup this week on finding new life – and discovering second chances. If you have a story to tell about your own second chance, visit The High Calling for details. The deadline is tonight.

Photograph by Patricia Lizbeth Medina de Anda via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

From the Dark Times – Creativity

Twice in my professional working life I experienced two dark times, and the results were as unexpected as they were confounding.

The year 1987 was a trifecta of convulsions. My father died suddenly in March, leaving behind a business that was a colossal mess. My church figuratively blew up in June. Then my job blew up in October, and I walked away from what many considered the best part of the company to work for.

A little over twenty years later, my job blew up – and for all the wrong reasons. Success in doing new things had outstripped the organization’s ability to deal with it, and so the team was broken apart.

Both situations led to self-doubt, loss of sleep, emotional turmoil, and ruptured relationships. For a time, it all looked dark.

In the first situation, within two short months in a different job in the company, a job that several people had turned down because it was largely about dealing with negative stuff, I realized I had walked into the equivalent of a professional gold mine. I had really good people working for me, and huge opportunities in front of us. I simply had not expected anything like this. A lot of work, yes, and dealing with negative stuff, yes, but the opportunity to change an industry? How did that happen?

I did some of the best work of my career. What we accomplished won national recognition and awards.

In the second situation, the critical thing was to keep as much of the team intact and functional as possible. Which we did, but it would never function like the old team had. Some people left, others were dispersed, but enough of the understanding and philosophy of work survived to allow people to continue to flourish.

But also born during this time was my decision to publish this crazy manuscript I had been playing with for three or four years. Eventually, that decision led to the publication of Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light Shining; becoming involved with poetry (and a new book – due out this December – Poetry at Work); and writing for The High Calling and Tweetspeak Poetry. None of that could have been foreseen at the time.

I’m doing some of the best writing of my life.

My purpose here isn’t to celebrate the dark times. They are awful to experience. But what came from them was something better, something I never would have believed possible, something I never would have imagined.

What came was creativity and accomplishment.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, we’ve been discussing Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree by Claire Burge. One of the questions Burge asks is, what dark places have developed your creativity? To see the discussion and the questions others answered, please visit the site.

Photograph by Emma Ivanova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Taking the Homeward Road

Somehow, I missed having a mid-life crisis. I don’t feel particularly deprived, but the fact is that the time of life when a lot of men seem to have a mid-life crisis – late 30s to the mid-40s – was bookended for me by two major career events.

The first was an extended period – from the time I was 37 to 45 – of almost incredible productivity and, for lack of a more humble word, achievement: speeches, national awards, game-changing programs implemented, and new technologies adopted. Looking back, I can see it was an amazing period of work.

The second bookend stretched from 45 to 48. Some of the achievement continued, but along came corporate turmoil, massive organizational and cultural change, being spun off with a separated business, and then, at the end of 1999, being laid off.

I spent the next four-and-a-half years not working within corporations. And that was by choice. I worked for myself for three-and-a-half of those years, and spent the final part of the time working for an urban school district in total crisis.

I did a lot of thinking.

I had a lot of time to think. As a consultant, I spent a lot of time in the car, traveling to and from my office to clients and meetings. One client was in north central Missouri, about a four-hour drive away from St. Louis, the last hour-and-a-half up a two-lane road. I had a lot of time to think.

“It may be,” writes David Whyte in The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, “that midlife is essentially a time of remembering what is most essential to us. We have spent years of building and consolidating – a business, a career, a family. Or we have attempted the sama dn failed to build anything. At the cusp of midlife, irrespective of success or failure, we now want to find out who was at the center of this attempt and what we were building for.”

What we do, Whyte says, and this largely describes what I did, is to take the old road back home, and we pass our younger self almost as a stranger, and then we keep going all the way back to before we set out. We may celebrate, and we may even mourn. “No matter what we have accomplished or what we command, midlife calls on us to experience it in a new way, to birth ourselves into a new kind of usefulness.”

For me, what happened was that I met the college student who read a lot of poetry. I met the 23-year-old who wanted to write novels. And I discovered the 50-year-old who had accomplished so much that, unintentionally and unknowingly, he often threatened the people he worked with.

What I learned, and kept learning, unfolded over a period of about 10 years. Even though my novel Dancing Priest is not at all autobiographical, it is indeed that, in a more deeply subtle way. I reread it (for only the second time) last week, and I found pieces of myself in nearly all of the characters. That was not intentional, but it was likely inevitable. The idea of the book was born in the turmoil of that time.

And the birthing “into a new kind of usefulness” continues. My writing is taking on a new kind of seriousness. Those “career” things which used to seem so vital and important are, well, less so.

Whyte concludes this “Taking the Homeward Road” chapter with part of a poem by T.S. Eliot, from “East Coker” in Four Quartets:

We must be still and still moving

into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

through the dark cold and the empty

         desolation.

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end

is my beginning.

That’s it. That's exactly it.

Led by Lyla Lindquist, we’re discussing The Heart Aroused over at TweetSpeak Poetry. My first  post on this week’s reading was Monday on chapter 5, “The Salmon of Knowledge.” Next week we’ll be covering the final two chapters of the book.