Tower of Pisa...

I'm driving down the road on my way back to the office after eating lunch with students at school, and Rufus Wainwright is singing to me on an old mix cd. He says, "I'm just a little bit Eros, a little bit Irish, a little bit Tower of Pisa whenever I see you so please be kind if I'm a mess."

Suddenly, I'm like, "Rufus. You are a genius!" (He can't hear me, of course, because he lives in some fancy apartment in L.A. or Paris or somewhere where he drinks chocolate milk and smokes cigarettes all day long. But for the moment, I pretend like I don't know that.) I say, "Rufus! We are a little bit Tower of Pisa."

I'm thinking about how no one would really care about the entire town of Pisa if there wasn't this crazy, poorly-built structure in the middle of it. It would just be another European town with another monastery, some nice artwork, and some fancy, old architecture. But....there is this leaning, messed-up building, and people go all the way across the globe just to see someone's screw-up.

There are lots of great products of screw-up's out there....Post-It's, Silly Putty, The Cleveland Browns 1999 expansion team...

...and then there's me. I was uniquely created, therefore I'm not a screw-up...but I still feel like I'm a little bent tower that isn't quite what I was intended to be. I think for moment about my potential, and how great it is, and how it's every so slightly skewed. (If we are desiring to make this the most obvious Christian parallel, we could say that this is a parallel for depravity, but I want to be a bit more specific than that.)

Yesterday, I met with the Leadership Development team all day, which is a chance for me to sit down with 6 of my brightest co-workers and brainstorm about our careers under the facilitation of YD President, Mark Evans. It's always a challenging and rejuvinating day, and by the end of yesterday's meeting, I could feel myself maturing as a leader and beginning to understand how young I still am. I told the group that if you put my worklife to a juicer, there could be a lot of excess squeezed out...so they asked me at what percentage of my current capabilities do I feel I am working, and I told them 50%. So. Having now voiced that, the challenge for me is to grow into the leader that I know I'm capable of being, especially now that I have told my co-workers how much more I am capable of doing.

I had this misconception that it was about being empowered and developed by those above you, but I'm beginning to get the impression that leading and doing is about choosing to do it yourself, not having it asked of you. This is difficult for me, because I thrive off of the brainstorming and accountability that comes in being an individual member of a dynamic team...

So, my need for personal management of time and priorities is increased since I spend most of my week in an office by myself.

In regards to the Tower of Pisa, it is a structure made famous by its blatant weakness. People flock to it because there is something wrong with it, yet it's somehow still beautiful? I don't quite get it, and I don't really want to dwell on it, other than to say I can choose to hide my weaknesses and keep scraping by...or I can choose to be a Tower of Pisa...which might mean following through on something and exposing weaknesses in the process. I assume that others might find something beautiful in that.