Yesterday I began my day with a 6:30am breakfast with a pastor. It was encouraging to hear all the missional work that is going on at Willow Creek. Then I had a meeting with Mindy Caliguire, who directs SoulCare, and we chatted about a variety of things, including a spiritual formation/mission of the church event to be held this summer in the Chicagoland area. And then it happened…
Yep, I had a committee meeting at North Park. The bane of academic existence. First, our committee is dealing with a sensitive issue about a colleague. (We all take the issues seriously.) Grant me that point, and I’ll now proceed to the zaniness my mind wanders into the minute I get to any kind of meeting.
Our first order of business was to find a Committee Chair. One person had already done it; another was asked… and eventually, with everyone saying they couldn’t do it, we got our way around the room to me. And I said, “If I’m appointed the chair, we will have only one more meeting at which time we’ll make the decision.” Several gasped when I suggested we could do such business in one meeting — and I kept quiet about my theory of “blick” [“blink”]: that we instantaneously make most of our decisions anyway. Then the Dean suggested that maybe I wouldn’t be the best Chair. Our Dean is wise, but he chose — let it be said — to drag our work into more than one meeting.
But this was next: the person under review gets to choose two people from the committee to be removed. We have fifteen and I was secretly praying it would be me. Dang, it wasn’t. I’m on the committee. For some reason I felt sorry for those dismissed; I would have been hooting and hollering and hooping it up.
Do I hear a second? (As in, for adjournment for the next meeting.)