Sermon - TLIS - 1.1.5 - "Footprints" and key performance indicators/metrics
Revelation 21:4
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
Job 14:22
They feel but the pain of their own bodies and mourn only for themselves.
Job 16:6
Yet if I speak, my pain is not relieved; and if I refrain, it does not go away.
Ecclesiastes 2:23
All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.
Jeremiah 15:18
Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable? You are to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails.
Isaiah 61:1
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners
Psalm 77:2
When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands, and I would not be comforted.
I know that an awful lot of people really like it but I've never liked "Footprints." For starters, what is it? Is it a poem? Is it a poster? Is it meme? I don't even know what to call it. A little inspirational piece.
Except opportunistic. For one thing, I know that the author has been grasping and demanding in asserting her intellectual property rights to the item in question. This is definitely a case where Mammon is winning out over God. So that's one knock against the poem. (If it is a poem.)
But quite apart from that, I don't particularly admire the concept. So, at the most difficult times of our life, when we feel completely isolated and alone, we are to take comfort from the fact that, in fact, we are not alone. It's just that God isn't talking to us.
At the same time that I am working on this, I am working on a series of articles hoping to educate those involved in the managing of volunteers. Some of the time those who are managing volunteers do have management training, and simply have never had the opportunity to try to motivate workers whom they cannot threaten because they cannot threaten to withhold a paycheck. (What part of "volunteer" do you not understand?)
But many who are managing volunteers do arise from the ranks of the volunteers, and do understand how to motivate the volunteer workforce, but have never had any training, or even possibly experience, with regard to management. So, therefore, I am covering basic management concepts, part of which involve metrics and key performance indicators.
A metric is a measurement. A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a metric which you use and collect, and even report on, because it is crucially important in terms of understanding how well your team, and by extension you, as their manager, are doing. It is about the performance of your team, and it is key. It is vital. It is as close as possible to the heart of the objective of your organization.
So let us return to the "Footprints" on the beach. And there are missing footprints at certain points, and we are trying to address the question of why they are missing, and we are told that they are missing because God has been carrying us through this stretch. Therefore, this time in our lives that was distressing, and bitterly painful, wasn't actually distressing or painful because God was with us.
Except that this is arrant nonsense. Yes, in faith we may accept that God was, in fact, with us, since God is with us at all times. But at these points, we actually *were* distressed, and in painful anxiety, and there was no comfort forthcoming.
So the key performance indicator here is not whether God was present or absent, but whether or not we have had comfort and relief during this difficult and trying time.
Okay, let us take God out of the picture for a moment and attempt another illustration, to try and observe the point that I am making. So you are in the hospital. You have a very painful condition. You have been in great pain, all night, and the nurses have not answered your call buzzer, and you are understandably miffed about all of this. And the next time you see the doctor, you task the doctor with the fact that he was not there. And the doctor will, quite reasonably in his own mind, answer that yes he *was* there. He was right next door in the next room. He was in fact observing you on a television monitor, watching a video feed from your room. So the doctor was there, and was watching you, and you were, in fact, in no medical danger at any time, and the doctor instructed the nurses not to respond to your calls because it was more important that you rest then that you complain to the nurses about your pain.
Your opinion about this whole situation might be slightly different from the doctor's. Yes, okay, he was present, or at least reasonably nearby, and he was observing you, all through the night, making sure that you were not in actual medical distress. The fact that you were in psychological distress from the pain has no significant negative impact on your prognosis or potential for recovery.
But you would probably be perturbed by all of this. You would point out that the pain, even if it doesn't actually prevent your body from healing and recovery, is extremely unpleasant, and there are means to relieve the pain.
I would say that the same thing is happening in "Footprints." Yes, God is here. We can accept that, on the face of it if nothing else. God is present with us.
But God is not comforting us. As a matter of fact nobody is comforting us. We feel alone. We feel in distress. We feel in psychological pain. It's not nice.
And the fact that God is supposed to be there doesn't help, if God is not going to comfort us. Why is God not going to comfort us in this painful situation? Is God present with us, but simply unconcerned about our pain? Does God not care about our distress? Am I somehow unworthy of God's comfort? The key performance indicator here is not presence or absence. The key performance indicator here is the pain, and the capability, or failure, to control the pain and provide pain relief.
"Footprints" seems to consider itself an answer to the problem of pain: why do bad things happen to good people? And, quite frankly, "God is with you" is not always a terribly comforting answer. (And for anyone who has read a number of my other sermons, at this point you may be expecting me to say that this provides us, human beings here on earth, God's hands in a fallen world, an opportunity to help someone else out. Hey, if the responsibility to help fits ...)
But I suppose that my objections to "Footprints" might be considered subjective. After all, I am a grieving widower and a depressive. It's painful, distressing, and difficult right now, so I may have a somewhat negative view of life overall.
Metrics are supposed to be objective, but very often they can seem surprisingly subjective. For example, while I enjoy the game of curling, I am bemused by commentators' claims that a player has statistics of 63% on hits or 97% on draws. It seems to me that these statistics are based on the assumption that the commentator knows, as well as, or if not better than, the actual player, what the player's intentions were. For example, if the commentator assumes that the hit rock was supposed to move 100 cm and instead it moves 50 cm, is that a hit rate of 50%? If the commentator assumed that the hit rock was supposed to move at an angle of 45° and instead it moves at an angle of 30°, is that a bit rate of 66%? What is the percentage of the combination of those two results?
Once again, the pandemic provided a number of examples of metrics. Vaccines were said to have efficacy rates that ranged widely. One particular vaccine was said to have an efficacy of 88%, others 92%, and yet others 97%. Supposedly, this was all based on precisely the same data. Obviously, there was some subjectivity in the interpretation here.
In addition, during the pandemic, BC's film industry struggled very hard to keep going during the crisis. They had strict regimes in terms of protection and isolation, as well as highly detailed reporting requirements. At the time that they were working on this, the media fastened on one particular metric, known as the positivity rate, and constantly reported on the positivity rate for various activities and situations. Reports from the film industry, only days apart, would give positivity rates of 12 to 87 to 133 for different variants of the COVID virus. So I suppose that possibly I shouldn't be as hard on "Footprints" for being somewhat subjective.
I suppose that I see "Footprints" as about as useful as the "let me know if there is anything I can do for you" response. The person who is in distress is in distress. The person in distress is damaged in some way. The responsibility for deciding not only what they need, but also your capabilities, your willingness, and your resources, and then doing the calculation of whether their need matches your capability, should not fall on them.
"God is with you" is about equivalently helpful.
I suppose that my real objection is to the thoughtlessness of it all. Someone else is in distress. They are in pain. One way or another. We are distressed to see their distress! We want to help! We have never been in this situation and we don't know what to do! So we take the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way out, regardless of whether it actually helps the person in distress or not.
Not helpful, guys.
Hoping is not always good enough. We all know where good intentions lead. You may have to give it a few extra seconds of thought. You may have to consider how painful this would be for you. You may have to consider what the other person's life is like and what your resources actually are, and what you can actually do for them that might actually comfort them in this situation.
Then do that.
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