The Limits of Outsourcing

We’re familiar with the scene in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer where Tom is given the task of painting the picket fence.  A boy comes by, says he’s off to go swimming.  Too bad Tom has to work.  Tom says, if you call this work.  And starts talking about how much fun it is and yet how not everyone has what it takes to paint it in a way that would satisfy Aunt Polly.

Before long, the boy starts painting, Tom starts to watch. 

Here’s the way Mark Twain describes the action:

And while the [boy who had pretended he was] late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash.

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Sawyer didn’t invent outsourcing, but he took it to new level.

I want to talk about outsourcing – its benefits, but mostly its limitations.

Curious Minds

Last week, I asked the third and fourth graders in our Religious School to imagine that they could ask God a single question and that God would answer it.  What might they ask?  Here are a few of the questions they shared:

Who created you? Are you a boy or a girl?  What happens after we die?  Are there aliens somewhere on another planet?   Will anything really sad happen to me?  Can I have 50 more questions?

It didn’t take long at all for our children to come up with these questions, which suggests that they had already been thinking about them.

We’re a contemplative species, as our tradition has long recognized.  Every morning we recite the words, “A person has many thoughts.”  In the words of Ecclesiastes (3:11), God puts eternity in our minds, “but without man ever guessing, from first to last, all the things that God brings to pass.” 

Don't Judge Me

A few weeks after Rosh Hashanah, a few years ago, someone in the congregation came to talk to me in my office.  He said that he felt like his life wasn’t going in the direction he wanted, and he wondered if maybe it was because he’d made what he considered a few mistakes.  He wondered if he was being judged in some way.   I asked what he meant and he said, ‘well maybe this is God’s way of telling me I messed up.’

He then told me that he also felt like other people were judging him negatively for what he’d done.  I’ll come back to what I told him at the end.

The more I thought about the conversation, the more I considered the issue of judgment.   This person is not alone in feeling like he’s being judged, either by God or by other people.

My sense from my professional and personal interactions with people is that judgment is something we often think about and worry about.   And while the feeling of being judged by God is important, I somehow feel that for most of us, it’s the sense that others are judging us that is more persistent. 

How do I look to my friends?  How did I come across in that conversation?  What did my friends in social studies class think of my speech?  Will my child think I’m too strict?  Will my spouse think I’m being annoying?  Will the people at work think I’m a team player?  

And if we consider our own feelings of wondering if and how we’re being judged, we may want to think about the extent to which we judge others and thereby contribute to the reservoir of discomfort that so many of us feel.

I want to say that while some situations call for our judgment, more often than not, what we need from each other is not judgment.  We need something else.   But I’m not there yet.