How to Ride a Dead Horse

How to Ride a Dead Horse

Ancient Rabbinic wisdom states that when you discover you are riding a dead horse (or camel), the best strategy is to dismount. However, church boards and committees often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like “This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”
4. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
5. Increasing the standards for those who ride the dead horse.
6. Appointing a committee to study the dead horse.
7. Waiting for the horse’s condition to improve from this temporary downturn.
8. Providing additional training to increase riding ability.
9. Passing a policy declaring, “This horse is not dead.”
10. Blaming the person who sold you the horse.
11. Acquiring additional dead horses for increased speed.
12. Declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
13. Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
14. Commissioning a study to see if lay-leaders can ride it cheaper.
15. Removing all obstacles in the dead horse’s path.
16. Taking bids for a state-of-the art dead horse.
17. Declaring the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead.
18. Revising the performance requirements for horses.
19. Saying the horse was cheaper than one that was “alive.”
20. Asking for increased donations (any excuse will do).

And if all else fails:

21.Declare that resurrecting the dead horse is the congregation’s primary mission.

Recently, I tried to resurrect the notion of daily blog posts. [And I still like the idea, because I believe in daily blogging as a good habit.] But it is currently a dead horse and I just need to dismount.

So, this post is me admitting that I am not currently able to commit to daily blog posts; that I will not be spending time answering the question, “how do you feel about how you spent your day?”; and I’m going to write whenever I like on whatever I like until I decide differently.

[plus, I have well over 60 new notecards to address when school lets up… and the old ones I still haven’t gotten to. #oneday #ihope]