Rocks in the oddest places
First, he asked about why removed doors from a set of nearby bathrooms. About a year ago, we removed these doors to our bathrooms behind the Activity Center. I initially thought these should be removed because they were redundant. The doors opened to a long hallway that provided all the privacy that was required - they seemed redundant, especially for those among us who are OCD about clean hands grabbing unclean handles. However, the big deal was that we had several cases where folks (particularly men) would get in the room and get confused by another locked door that went to an adjacent locker room. In one instance, a guest was so flustered by this that he was pounding on the door and yelling obscenities. Through the addition of signage, we solved a part of the problem, but without opening a door to get in, it is unlikely that we are going to search for a door to get out. So, we removed them.
Second question he had concerned "the rocks in the sinks" - why were they there? About three years ago, we redecorated a different set of bathrooms and in that exercise of redecoration, we added rocks in the sinks. They look nice. But, they are obviously a decoration and not something functional to the use of the sink. Just as other decorations are not functional to the use of the bathrooms, the rocks add "a look" to a room that really needed to be updated. My response to his question was that "they look nice."
Here are a few lessons:
We did not communicate the changes to the church. We just made the changes. Sometimes, that's okay because the value of the change is so obvious. But, I'm discovering more and more that those times are an exception. The church needs to know what's going on - not just in the buildings we use but in the lives of the Body of Christ.
Our seasoned saints especially require communication - relentless communication, as we have called it. It can be easy for them to feel left out. And, we don't want any committed member of the Body to feel this way.
Sometimes, relentless communication still goes on three years later.
Distractions from the mission of the church - changing lives - abound. God is doing great things in the Body of Christ at Central Community. Huge, great, powerful, Spirit-filled-driven things. Lives are being changed! Yet, on top of all the distractions to deal with, the ones from inside the Body may be the most numerous.
Of course, the unstated, elephant-in-the-room lesson is this: the expense of a bag of rocks was not in its purchase, but in its mere presence in a bathroom.
(By the way, the rocks in the sinks we have are not the picture in this posting - its stock footage).
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