Following the Leader

I feel like I’ve been hit by a ton of bricks.

Have you ever been working on something or teaching something that instantly smacks you in the face and convicts you?

Because that just happened to me.

I’ve been researching the importance of time use for collegians as it relates to collegiate ministry. What I found was not that surprising. Students are having to balance several different plates of responsibility and only have so many hours in a day to take care of all of these responsibilities.

Students are caught in a time crunch.

But some of the research shows that a bit of this pressure can be alleviated. It appears that students often waste valuable study and preparation time because they engage in behaviors that hinder their success, such as constantly checking social networking while studying or intentionally putting off assignments until the last minute.

All of this was sounding familiar.

It was a perfect picture of me when I was in college.

And It was a pretty accurate picture of me now.

I was guilty. I had just checked Facebook for the third time that night. I was already behind where I wanted to be on this project because I had procrastinated. 

Things got worse when I read that one of the ways that collegians develop the necessary time management skills was by watching a professor or leader and modeling their behavior.

And then it hit me. If they’re watching me and I’m modeling the wrong behaviors, chances are they’ll develop similar behaviors.

This principle applies to more than just time management. It connects back to my thinking on leaving a legacy from a few weeks ago. We can expect that if we’re modeling the wrong spiritual behaviors to our students, the chances are that some of them will follow our lead.

It’s a lot like Simon says. It’s always difficult to do what someone says when you can see them doing something else. You want to follow the leader.

This isn’t all bad news, of course. When we demonstrate good behaviors for our students, we know that this can serve to reinforce that behavior in them.

But this should cause collegiate ministers to stop and examine the behaviors that are being modeled for their students.