Saturday morning…
Each Saturday we have our weekly sales meeting. At this meeting we discuss the relevant things that we need to know each week… our used car inventory, recent ads, and any other important stuff.
There also tends to be a motivational element to each of these meetings.
The thing that I am recognizing more and more in this business is that THE motivator is money. All of the pep rallies that we have, all of the motivation that we are given revolves around the almighty dollar.
As I sit through our sales meetings and listen, I am repeatedly struck by how hollow it sounds… How the assumption is that if we make money, we will be content and happy…
Yesterday I wrote a little bit about a couple that bought a previously owned vehicle from me. In the ten minutes between the family leaving the store, and the accident that they had, I had a conversation with one of our finance managers about my current pay status. He was talking to me about how I would start to do better now that I am on straight commission.
I disagree.
I have noticed that I am doing the same amount of work now, I am handling myself in the same manner, and I am looking at my customers the same way…
The only difference that I have noticed is that I am a little more concearned about paying for the tires that my Xterra needs, and whether or not I will sell enough cars to pay for said Xterra…
My motivation is, and always has been to serve and care for people… not to be rich (if it was, youth min was the worst degree ever)… While the idea of making a good bit of money is appealing to me (I could buy a house!), all I really want is to make enough money to live…
Each morning when I arrive in the parking lot, I spend some time in scripture, and finish with the simple prayer: Lord, let all my dealings be honoring to you… Amen. Each night when I leave work, I spend some time reflecting on the days events to make sure that my conscience is clean…
While I cringe when people make us out to be providers of some kind of transportation salvation (we make peoples lives better!), I want to leave knowing that I did not make someone’s life worse than when they came in.
A couple of days ago Steven talked about the congregation that I had around me. I agree that there is a need where I am. I have also seen where God is giving me access into people’s lives that I have no business having. I am watching as people who are being motivated by money, and money alone are finding it to be a hollow, empty idol that does not solve their relationship issues, does not give them happiness, and leaves them hungrier than before.
And so I wrestle with how to effect change in a culture that is based on a false idol. How do I lead from the bottom here? Thus far (since the end of October) I have begun to build relationships that are a little deeper than those that seem to be typical here. I have had conversations about anger issues, depression, relational distress, financial difficulties, and true passions…
I love and care for the people that I work with, and I long for them to see the man behind the curtain, and realize that there is more to work, more to life than the cash that is so often dangled in front of us. My desire is for these people that I rub shoulders with on a daily basis to embrace their calling, and engage with their creator.
And while my wiring, my background, my giftings, and my skills have me dieing to engage the system and the culture, reshaping it better fit who we are made to be… I find myself in a place where I need to engage the people, all the while hoping and praying that my influence in their lives is enough to allow them overcome…
And so I hope and pray… and ask God to help me embrace this current role…
Filed under: car sales, leadership, life, ministry
Before my husband and I moved to Germany, I worked for a mortgage company. Long story short, I got to the point of being very discouraged…..because everything I did revolved around money! Money, and mortgages and houses that neither the company nor the mortgagors would care about in a hundred years. I really couldn’t figure out the point of my being there.
Longer story shorter, I realized that if there were to be meaning in this job, I would have to create it myself. So I started sending emails to my co-workers at the start of each workday: brief, motivational quotes. Sometimes from the Bible, sometimes just something inspiring or thought-provoking from my personal collection of quotes.
Pretty soon, people started telling me how much they appreciated those emails. The quotes helped my co-workers’ days start better. Several said they felt refreshed throughout the whole day.
I firmly believe that once I changed my attitude toward *my* workday, God was able to use me as a tool to give others a glimpse of him.
You don’t have to be employed by a congregation in order to be a minister. By definition, *every* Christian is a minister. Or…all of us are supposed to be ministers, anyway. Simply by brightening the corner of the world that we’re in.
)
yeah, I’ve been thinking lately about some of the stuff you said in this post… What if the future of church is in large part the “leading from the bottom” like you’d said. What if your (our) desire to affect people and the culture on the whole will end up being done more effectively outside of a large church, and we eventually didn’t even think of church anymore as some place that we go to or are a part of.
Granted, corporate worship and I guess teaching to some extent could/should be large events which a traditional church can provide, but I can’t help but thinking that someday, maybe your job as a car salesman, hoping that you’re ministering to people, will be looked at more as a job ministering to people, and selling cars to some extent while you’re doing that.
who knows…
I resonate with a good bit of what you say, but at the same time I tremble in fear…
I hope that we never get to the point where the church is something that we not a part of. I think that there has been an unhealthy shift over the last few hundred years to where the work of ministry is left to the priesthood, but I get the sense that there is more and more a shift back to grassroots ministry… this is what I think the whole idea of being missional really means…
as to leading from the bottom… I think that the future of the church is dependant on this, but maybe not in the way that most people think of it… I think that there needs to be a continual movement of people to retool the church to operate in the post modern context (please note, I will delete any comments about how post modernism is evil and all that crap, owning the domain is so cool) in some places leading from the bottom means helping the earlier generations, and those in leadership to embrace the culture change… in other places, leading from the bottom means setting off and beginning a new movement all together.
But to be honest with you, I don’t know that I can ever see the church not being a significant player in impacting the world…
[...] say you want a revolution… So I was reading something about selling cars, and it reminded me about some other stuff I’ve been reading/hearing/thinking [...]