Dealing with incompleteness

By Tom Ehrich

I needed something done. While my skills grow daily, they hadn’t grown this far. So I asked experts to help.

What a concept! Asking for help.

First, I asked a talented web developer named Pinsi Lei to create three new web sites. Each one simple, deploying latest web technology, not reams of pages that no one will visit, rather a focused message and clean functionality.

This week our new sites went live:
www.morningwalkmedia.com
www.onajourney.org
www.churchwellness.com

A fourth site — http://Plannir.com — will go completely live later this summer to introduce our new app for work management. You can visit now to register for an early look at the app. The expert on this one is Tamerlan Sosiev.

Second, I asked a video production expert named Yana Biryukova to create videos for telling our story. Nothing communicates as effectively on the web as a good video. You can see her first efforts on the three new sites.

Third, I ramped up our systems for managing subscriptions and email newsletters. The technology I had been using was fine, but I needed more.

I share this with you to make a point: asking for help is wise. None of us needs to know it all or do it all. God gave us to each other. One blessing of our inter-connected and diverse modernity is that we can acknowledge our incompleteness and turn to our neighbors for assistance.

Yes, it was humbling to realize that Pinsi had a far better design eye than mine and that she knew more web tools than I knew. I watch Yana construct a video, and I find it magical.

Humility is good. Humility cuts through the delusion that we can be all-sufficient. It makes the fundamental ethical point that we are incomplete without each other, that all have something to give, and that no one is expendable.

The walls we build don’t keep us safe. They merely trap us in incompleteness.