Today is "Black Friday" and I'm home sipping coffee, smelling bacon cooking and listening to my son whine about not getting a Yahtzee (in his world he "never" wins). We have foregone the madness that is the mecca for shoppers across America a few years back. Some of the decision was made for us with having kids to attend to. Some of it was from the pulpit and the conviction that comes from the inability to pay out tithes but the ability to spend a huge wad of money on toys and gifts no one really needs. It never occurred to me to think of the retail workers who work that day.
But this blog isn't some diatribe about worker's rights and the media's fight to bring down Wal-Mart. I find it funny that the liberal Huffington Post is all over Wal-Mart each week for a variety of reasons, from wages to the disparity between incomes for its corporate honchos to "ruining" Thanksgiving by opening its doors to shoppers. No one mentions the shoppers, who share some of the blame for seeking consumptuous (new word alert!) deals and a Thunderdome mentality to survive with the one electronic that will rule them all.
Back when I worked retail, the lure of extra pay during the holidays was rather appealing to someone who wanted more and who had no one to care for at home. That's the difference now. The people I worked with at Target many years ago were teenagers like me who didn't really care if we worked on Christmas Eve. There were grandmas too, people who had retired and went back to work. Single moms and those working a second job. The economy has always been in flux. I've always worked with people who were above the skills needed to perform a task, and those that were forced back into work to help ends meet. The real issue is that the ends we are trying to meet are continuing to drift further and further away.
Priorities and balance have always been an issue for people, especially for myself. The time you devote to yourself dwindles with the commitments towards your kids, your wife and the pressures of work. That just becomes inevitable. There are times when I groan about driving to soccer practice, or having to clean my house. It gets tiring. I begin to take score. I've done x amount of chores but my wife has only done x amount. The analytic teacher side of me fixates on results rather than intentions.
But when you approach life with the charts and graphs of an evaluation, the results will never become clear. In education, half of my performance evaluation is determined by something we call "value added." It's some complex theory that tries to relate the growth of each individual student. Test scores are analyzed, computed in some database and a line graph and numbers are assigned to each teacher in the state of Ohio. We have workshops and conferences to help us read our data. We spend days on professional development to somehow use this data to serve the kids in our classrooms. It's a never ending cycle of number crunching. This year in particular has become numbing in the assessments, tests and attention I've devoted to charting trends and standards targets. I spend more time grading papers and interpreting data than I do teaching.
So I bring more work home, and the work at home becomes cluttered and dusty. When I'm not grading, I'm reading and jotting notes towards the men's ministry at our church. We currently have no men's ministry. It's just me and a small group of courageously committed men hammering out the vision and mission to help our men become God's man. There's a youth ministry component to our lives as well.
So tell me when does burnout happen?
I had a meeting the other day with a great friend. The kind that isn't afraid to speak truth into your life. The kind who is witness to the gifts I bear to others. I brought my judgment, my frustrations, my dreams into his office like I would bring in ingredients to some fantastic meal that has yet to be cooked. I leave with a silver platter of a dish ready to serve. But decisions must be made. The youth? The men? My family? My service to God? I have no complex graph to turn to, not some binder with statistics and highlighted phrases for me to interpret. The human side of me needs answers while the spiritual side demands patience and perspective. I liked it when there was just laundry to worry about.
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