Left Hands, Right Hands, and the Brain in Between
Recently I took a five hour road trip. You should know that I drive a thirteen year old car with nearly 170,000 miles on it. My teenage car can do five hour road trips, but like most teenagers, it doesn’t want to. It gets moody. Makes weird noises. Starts to smell. Threatens to abandon me halfway through the trip.
And so I made the decision to rent a car for the two days I’d be gone. The plan was to pick up the car from a rental company at the airport at 8 a.m. Monday – leaving my car there at the rental place – and return the rental at 8 a.m. Wednesday.
Here’s the problem: the rental place didn’t want my teenage car to stay there for two days (something about bringing down the values of all of their fancy newborn rentals). They helpfully suggested that I could leave my car in the official airport parking. I helpfully agreed with my inner cheapskate that I’d spend nearly as much in parking my car as I would renting theirs.
So there on the spot, I asked the guy how their inventory was if I were to drive back to the church office and get a friend to drive me back to the rental place later that morning. He told me, “Man, we’ve got cars for days. No worries. You’ll be fine.”
Fast forward a half hour, when I called the company’s national line to make sure there wasn’t a problem with adjusting my pick up and drop off times. I made the mistake of second-guessing guy #1 and asking, “Now, there will be cars left there if I go later this morning, correct?” The helpful lady told me no, there are in fact not a lot of cars left, and if I were there at that very moment I could get a mini van or a pickup truck. Or maybe a Segway. Or a camel. But I would not in fact have “cars for days.”
And so I sweated a bit, waited on my buddy to get to the office, asked him to kindly drive 120 miles per hour so I would not miss out on the good camels, and raced back to the rental place…only to find that not only could I choose from a wide selection of four-hoof drive camels, but I could also peruse the dozens of cars that were still sitting there, just like the first guy said.
Now, why do I share this story and bring you in on all the drama of my dromedary rentals? Because in this particular case, my normally Johnny-on-the-spot rental company put me on the spot. The left hand said one thing. The right hand said another. And I was stuck in the middle, wondering if I was going to have to bust a hump to get on the road (#didyouseewhatididthere).
In our guest services worlds, I fear that we are sometimes like my rental company. Because the leaders and volunteers don’t communicate, we introduce unnecessary angst for our guests. Because we don’t have cohesive systems, we introduce drama where there should be none. Because we fail to double check our answers before we blurt them out, we introduce confusion rather than clarity.
Jesus was right about the fact that sometimes, our left hands don’t need to know what our right hand is doing (Matthew 6:3), but in this case, I think he’d make an exception.
(And he’d probably go for the pickup truck. Because the disciples had already left in one accord.)
