Gee, Thanks for the Heads Up!

By Ken Laue

The dispatch radio crackled, intruding on the muffled, lulling hum of the Catepillar engine powering my Bluebird bus and the murmur of the children on their Monday morning ride to school.

“Have you made the stop at . . .” the voice named an unfamiliar intersection.

“I don’t have that stop on my route,” I replied.

“That stop was added to your route and begins today.”

“Nobody shared that with me.”

“Can you turn around and go back?”

The stop in question was about nine miles away, and I was within a half mile of the school. I was irritated, but kept my cool.

“Only if you want the rest of the students to be very late; and if you can cover my high school run that follows.”

They sent a relief driver to cover the new stop that day.

Giving persons who are affected by a decision or action a “heads up” is a critical but frequently overlooked attitude or habit. A weakness of our fallen nature, even.

The God we Christians serve is a God of relationships.

A cornerstone to all relationships – with God, family, church mates, playmates or co-workers – is communication.

Communication is an often neglected skill which requires thought, effort, and respect.

Lack of communication in its most benign forms is an irritant. In its more significant manifestations it is a relationship damager.

The husband who stays out late into the evening without informing his spouse of his whereabouts is asking for trouble. And also, most likely, up to no good.

You were watching the game with the boys. Uh-huh.

The wife who spends a lot of money at the mall without consulting hubby is not scoring any points, to put it mildly.

Or take the child who gets off at a different bus stop to go to a friend’s house but neglects to ask permission or even tell Mom or Dad of the change in normal activities. 

Now you encounter a frantic parent whose son or daughter didn’t get off the bus as expected. For sure, some pervert in the neighborhood snatched the child, an imagination-run-wild tells the parent.

Such a kid may find this scenario detrimental to the nerve endings in the posterior, as well as to his relationship with Mom and Dad.

Oh, wait: I forgot. It’s not politically correct to spank disobedient children these days.

Whether you’re a supervisor, manager, leader, head of a church ministry, or just an ordinary Joe, others are affected by your decisions. Do you think to clue them in?

It can even be something as simple as using your blinker in traffic.

“Don’t be a stinker, use your blinker,” the bumper sticker says. Good advice. 

In the early years of the summer camp I founded with my wife Bonnie, I found the adult workers were just standing around instead of addressing needs I felt were obvious.

I approached our children’s ministry pastor with my frustration.

“Well, did you tell anyone what was expected of them or what was needed?” Frank said.

Duh! I had just assumed everybody understood automatically; that everyone saw through my eyes and heard through my ears.

It dawned on me that people can’t read my mind. What a heavy revelation!

The need for communication: so obvious, but I never saw it until Frank opened my eyes.

Sometimes Bonnie goes out to scour the second-hands after she picks up the grandbabies from school.

Now, by my Martian standards, Bonnie’s Venutian internal clock is a bit tweaked, and she easily loses track of time.

I get home and find the house empty. It’s five thirty; it’s six; it’s pushing seven.

I’ve learned it’s premature to start calling hospital emergency rooms or the search-and-rescue, so I fight back my panic.

A call to her cell phone reveals my little Alice in a Wonderland of gongas, hunting down outfits for the baby girls and similar treasures.

“I’m in the checkout line and I’ll be home soon,” she says.

Whew!  She’s still alive!

By habit I wake up early for a Saturday bike ride while she sleeps deep into the morning. So I’ve learned to scrawl a little note and leave it on the kitchen table – just so she knows I wasn’t snatched by aliens.

It may not always be other people’s failure to communicate with us, but our failure to pay attention or be observant.

When I was a supervisor, I was often the one called upon to drop what I was doing and fill in for absent bus drivers.

That day I made it through the high school route, survived the elementary kids and even survived the inaccurate route cards (not unusual).

As I crested the hill towards Maxwell Middle School on Tucson’s west side, I was no less than twenty minutes late. 

Normally Maxwell is a zoo of parent cars, kids walking home, traffic and school buses; like most schools at dismissal. Today the place was an absolute ghost town.

I grabbed the mic.

“I just arrived at Maxwell. I’m twenty minutes late. Where are the kids?”

I thought Dispatch would say they had covered the middle school run and forgot to tell me (which would not have been unusual either).

The dispatcher got on, trying to choke back laughter. I heard others laughing in the background. 

“It was middle school early-outs today,” he said, fairly choking on his words.

I was so embarrassed.

If only I had checked the bulletin board for daily announcements I would have known.

I could have been back at my desk by now, working on my stack of service requests.

The driving staff had gone home already to enjoy their afternoon off.

I was a little more merciful the next time I had to deal with an employee who had missed an important posting or communiqué.

You woulda known if you’d been paying attention!

Nope. I couldn’t say it that way anymore.

In the church body the same kinds of things can happen. A group leader or someone in charge of a ministry can forget or neglect to tell the team about important decisions, actions or expectations.

Then, when a subordinate worker gets scolded for not meeting the leader’s expectations, it can lead to hard feelings. 

Sometimes a member of the team doesn’t pay attention to instructions, or is oblivious to the heart of his leader or pastor.

This can also lead to unnecessary friction. 

Sometimes people may leave a church because they have an unteachable or rebellious attitude, or they may have simply backslidden. It happens.

But I also wonder how often it could be because a church member or leader on some level exhibited a lack of people skills and a lack of communication and consideration that might have driven off a church member who was already a bruised reed or a smoking flax (Matthew 12:20).

While Jesus could be very direct or blunt with his disciples, or with the religious hypocrites when warranted, He also handled individuals very carefully who easily could have been crushed, such as the woman at the well (John 4) or the woman taken in adultery (John 8).

We must fine-tune our communications, being sensitive to where the individual is at in their walk with God and their relationship with us.

When it comes to our relationship with God, problems may arise when we don’t read His daily bulletin board postings. Refusing to obey instructions in His word or carelessly overlooking them also leads to miscommunication on our part.

God tries to reach us through the sermon, but all too often we miss a key point because we’re zoned out and not paying attention.

For example, have you ever sent or read a text message in church? Don’t raise your hand.

But God doesn’t just speak to us via Bible reading/study or the pastor’s sermons.

Sometimes He speaks through other people; even unsaved people, if you can believe that.  Sometimes He speaks to you in that private place in your heart or through your conscience. Any reader who is a Christian can cite examples of this.

The important thing is to avoid being so caught up in our own little worlds that we are too callous, busy or stressed out to hear God talking to our hearts. 

Even though God knows everything in advance, it is still very important for Him to hear from you and me in prayer.

First and foremost He craves a relationship with each of us.

Just like failing to communicate with your spouse will be detrimental to your marriage, failing to pray to God on a regular basis will do your relationship with Him no good; it will only erode it. The same is true of failing to read the owner’s manual he gave us.

No, not the one in your glove box. The other manual. The one you carry to church.

God is a God of relationships, and He is a God of communication. This is evident in the ways He deals with us.

He wants us to carry that into all our earthly relationships as well.

Good communication is a cornerstone of good relationships, and Jesus is the prime example. God’s invitation to communicate with Him and to have a relationship with Him is exemplified in Jeremiah 33:3: “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.”

Accept this challenge. You cannot fail to be blessed.

Carry His example of good communication into your earthly relationships and you can’t help but bless those around you.