renew… planting Seeds you will never see grow?
There is paint on the kitchen table…
There is paint on the kitchen table, a book face down beside it, and 4 of us are heading out to see what the garden did overnight. That is Saturday now. Nobody announced it. It just became the shape of the day, the way these things do.
I am 2 generations past being the one who gets handed things. I am the one doing the handing now, and almost none of it happens in words. They are not listening to me. They are watching me.
If you are the leader everybody assumes arrived fully formed, this last one is for you. You are handing something down right now, at work and at home, and the part that lands is not the part you say out loud. Because renew is not the day off. It is going back for what was planted in you, and then planting it again in somebody who will not thank you for 30 years.
…and he never stopped being a student
Riley B. King‘s mother died when he was 9. His grandmother Elnora raised him, and she died when he was 14. A preacher named Archie Fair, family by marriage, let the boy hold his guitar and showed him 3 chords. That was the whole inheritance.
He never finished school. He ordered books by mail and studied them between shows. “I don’t have a good education but I like to read a lot.” He learned to fly at 38, mid-career, while working 300 nights a year. And then Yale and Brown handed him doctorates he had never sat a class for. A man who was given 3 chords and would not stop going back for more.
I like to live the love…
In 1973 he cut a track with a title that is not a sermon and not a boast. I Like to Live the Love.
Read it again. He is not singing about the love. He says he likes to live it. That is a small word, like, and it is doing all the work. Not preach it. Not promise it. Live it, and enjoy living it, in front of everybody who is watching.
That is the whole of what gets handed down. Not the singing. The living, or the failure to. The people coming up behind you cannot hear what you sing at all. They can only see what you live.
After he recorded a live album inside Cook County Jail he started playing prisons for free, and had done more than 50 of them by 1998. His reason was not charity. “I don’t think that when a guy does something wrong he shouldn’t be punished, but if he does it as a human being, he should pay for it as a human being.” Nobody made him. There was no part of his career that needed it.
the best of Archie and AA…
I had 2 grandfathers and I am trying to be the best of both, which is harder than it sounds, because they were opposites.
Archie, my Mom’s dad, would pull the car over at any moment, walk into a field, and say come look at this with me. Nothing was ever a lecture. AA wore a white shirt and a tie every day of his life, no exceptions, worked through the Depression for the Post Office, and kept a garden that was something to marvel at. I only found out at his funeral that he was the youngest of 12 and a natural comedian.
Fun and creative from the one. Structured and disciplined from the other. The painting and the reading are Archie. Showing up every single Saturday is AA. The Seeds I am planting are not mine. I am passing on 2 men my grandchildren will never meet.
And underneath both of them, the part I most want the grandkids to keep: that this is God’s world, and it rewards looking at closely. The tomatoes and the paintbrush and the book are all the same lesson.
…so what are they watching you live?
There is a poster I kept for years with a line on it attributed to St. Francis. “Preach the Gospel always. Use words only when necessary.” It is the closest thing I have to a summary of my own faith, and it is the same idea Riley was singing. You do not hand down what you profess. You hand down what you are observed doing.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: pick 1 thing you say you value, and do it this Sunday where somebody smaller than you can watch. Not explain it. Do it.
Helping leaders close the distance between what they say they value and what their people actually see is most of the work I do now. Schedule time with me here.
7 days on a man who was handed 3 chords by a preacher and spent 65 years paying it back. He never claimed he had arrived. He kept going back for more, and he did not sing about the love. He sang that I Like to Live the Love.
