The Starving Baker

Last week, I was apart of an amazing event. We brought together some great leaders and had the opportunity to interact with them for three days. We provided 15 breakout sessions with excellent people who were willing to share what they are experiencing and learning in their settings and then we went on to two full days of general session with great speakers like Donald Miller and Andy Stanley. And yet as I sat and stared at the computer last night and now tonight, I realize that as amazing as I hear the event I was apart of was, I walked away with very little to share about it. I have been so busy working that I haven’t heard anything interesting, read anything interesting, or even thought of anything interesting for weeks. It reminds me of a leadership lesson I read years ago.

In Tim Elmore’s first Habitudes book (www.growingleaders.com) he introduces the image of the starving baker. The story goes something like this….imagine you find a great little bakery and apparently many other people also discover it is a place worth frequenting. You often visit the shop and enjoy the wonderful breads and pastries the baker provides. You come to notice the baker is rapidly losing weight. You take the time to observe what is happening in his life and you notice he is so busy preparing and serving bread to others that he is forgetting to eat himself. Ironically, he is surrounded by nourishment and yet he is starving.

Admittedly, some seasons are more intense than others, but I am reminded that it is worth counting the price that will be paid if we allow ourselves to go for a prolonged amount of time without investing in ourselves. Leading up to Catalyst, I tried to admit the reality of life without throwing it all out the window for six weeks. I knew going to the gym five days a week for an hour a day was not going to be realistic so I aimed for three times a week for thirty minutes. The goal was to recognize reality and come up with some realistic expectations that could keep me on the right track. I think sometimes in life we need to do this relationally, spiritually, and in our plans for personal growth. Perhaps it is hard to do because we feel like we are letting ourselves off the hook when we should be working harder to get it all in. We, rightfully, do not want to lower our expectations of ourselves, but on the other hand we do need to accept the reality of a particular, defined, period of time. It can be tricky. We can’t let the current busy season roll into the next busy season and continue to get by only putting in the minimum across the board or we will end up feeling the effects of that.

Tim shares another story in this lesson about the starving baker that really brings it home for me. He talks about two lumberjacks who challenge each other to see who could cut the most trees down in a day. The first lumberjack started his day by “wasting” two hours sharpening his axe while the other lumberjack jumped ahead in the contest by immediately felling trees, but at the end of the day it was the lumberjack who had taken the time to sharpen his axe that had cut the most trees down. By the end of the day the first lumberjacks axe was still sharp while his colleagues axe was dull. The same amount of hard work and strength was being put in by both for the last half of the day, but the one who had prepared himself was able to do his job much more effectively.

I very much understand that we can sit and look at our schedules and not see any time to invest in ourselves, but yet I can also see the folly in that. Knowing the right thing to do is often simple, but following through and actually doing it is often hard. It is my hope that I can keep the image of the starving baker before me when I enter my next season of craziness. It is worth being intentional about investing in ourselves for our long term physical, mental and spiritual health, as well as for the quality of whatever it is we aim to produce for others.

(I will get the cd's of the event so maybe later I can have something to share from it :-)