Thanks for your,prayers and blessings.
What are the crossroads, if you care to share, that you feel that you are standing at?
Personally I have decided to take a step more towards ordination but I want to make it in God's time,and will and not my own.
Plus I enjoy this time of rest study and family. Ministry is a battlefield I am not sure i am equiped or ready for yet.
What are the crossroads, if you care to share, that you feel that you are standing at?
Personally I have decided to take a step more towards ordination but I want to make it in God's time,and will and not my own.
Plus I enjoy this time of rest study and family. Ministry is a battlefield I am not sure i am equiped or ready for yet.
Specifically, I went out to ask for funding for an end-of-year exhibition that the students are organizing. They under-estimated the funds they can raise and so ended up $10K short. The people I know are the older bosses who are now semi-retired, and the firms are run by younger people whom I don't know so well. Anyway, the older guys passed the request to the younger guys. One of them had a previous meeting with the Head of School and had told her that he'd like everything to go through him as far as requests from the School is concerned. He took exception to the fact that I went to the older guy first. He basically told me off (he had actually said the same thing to me earlier) and then wrote, I think, to the Head of School to say the same thing.
She then told me off about it. Firstly, she reminded me that she had told me (and the rest of the management team) that from now on we need to approach industry in a more structured manner. However, she didn't tell me that she had visited this particular firm nor what happened during the visit. Also, she didn't identify who is the point of contact from the School side. She also said that the as email I wrote was embarrassing, begging for money.
Thinking it over, I took a calculated risk writing to the older guys because we had been working together and they had been very supportive. So, I knew them well enough, I thought, to speak from the heart. Did I do wrong here? I do have a tendency to just speak straight from the heart and not watch over every word. I had the students at heart, they had worked hard to raise funds and it was understandable that they over-reached. I wanted to help them. To be honest, I don't regret doing so.
My problem now is how to mend bridges with the Head of School. To defend myself, I have to point out that she should have told me about her visit more specifically and told me who is representing us at the School level. I don't think she will be receptive to me. She hasn't been in the past. Even when I asked her, when she was telling me off, who should I work with, she wasn't able to say. I don't know how to move forward. I work with industry and I need to meet with them. But, if the School is not organized, I have to work on my own. She can't be jumping everytime she gets an unhappy email from them.
I am not good at talking to emotional people. I tend to give in and say sorry to help the situation. Also, she hasn't been receptive to me. So, I don't know if she will listen if I try to talk to her.
I don't know where I stand with her. I don't know if she wants me to continue as Head of Department. I don't know how best to talk to her. I'm worried that I might make the situation worse. It doesn't help that we have staff who are unhappy and disagree with what I'm doing or how I run the department. I feel I am undermined by my staff as well. I wonder if I'm being paranoid. I feel like I should do something but I don't know what to do.
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