The "Beauty" of Supervision

The Beauty of Supervision

Today, I had a rush of childhood memories flood back into my mind as I sat in my fourth-grade classroom amidst a group of seven students. We had a group project to undertake in History today, and the curriculum only accounted for 6 students to be in a group. In a class with 7 students, I knew that a curriculum plan for 6 would be a no-go. You simply can’t assign everyone a “job” or a “responsibility” in the group and just let one person off scot-free. So, what did I do?

I had no other choice but to create a position.

The name of the position? “Group Supervisor”

Here’s the description that I made up to go with it: “The Group Supervisor holds the clipboard and the ‘Miss Hill’ signature stamp. Every time the group completes a step of the project correctly, the group supervisor will stamp the checklist and tell the group to keep going.”

Pretty lame idea, right? I thought no one would’ve went for it.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The kids loved it.

They even began discussing who would get to do the “supervisor” job for our project tomorrow before we even had a chance to start our project for today.

What exactly did the “supervisor” do?

The same thing every supervisor does.

The same thing my siblings did to me growing up.

“You do the work, and I’ll supervise.”

What kid doesn’t LOVE that idea?

Supervising is fun.

Holding a clipboard with a fancy stamp is even “funner.”

Doing practically nothing while everyone else is busy is perhaps the “funnest” of all.

------------Enter flashback flood of childhood memories--------------

When I was a young girl, my sister and I shared a bedroom. When I say we "shared a bedroom," that's really a loaded phrase that also goes on to include everything from the sharing of toys and clothes to closet space and cleaning up, etc. Several times, we did the infamous “you get this half of the room, I get this half of the room” scenario. Sometimes, the line was imaginary and therefore very flexible. Sometimes, it was very tangible and pretty much un-cross-able.

My sister and I are four years apart. We did and do all the regular things sisters do; but, at the end of the day, we get along quite nicely. Always have, really. Because of this, we didn't really have a problem sharing toys when we were younger. We're about the same size now, so we still have no problem sharing clothes. (Although, I will admit that I went through a season of life where I only got complimented when I wore HER clothes. Go figure. haha)

But life wasn’t always a room full of Roses (pun intended), my sister Rosie and I did have a handful of disagreements. As far as I remember, the only thing we really disagreed upon was cleaning up OUR room.

You see, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to clean our room…. it’s just…. well, neither one of us thought it was OUR responsibility to do the cleaning. Somehow, my sister always seemed to be the messy one. (Ask her, and I’m willing to bet that she’d give you a different side of that story.) When it came to cleaning up OUR room, that meant SHE needed to get it together because MY side was already clean. Haha… Or. So. I. Claimed.

The problem with that was she claimed the same thing. It wasn’t HER business to clean up MY mess.

So there we stood. In a messy bedroom. Waiting.

And for quite a while, nothing ever happened. The mess continued to exist.

But it didn’t always go down that way.

I do remember one time we chose to embrace the task of “cleaning” our room together by getting super silly about it. As I recall it, we stacked up all the clothes in our room we could find that didn’t have a home in their proper places in the closet or chest of drawers, and built the “Tower of Babel” as we so-quickly-and-oddly named it (such Biblical role players we were…haha), and we then proceeded to slide down this massive pile of clothes in the middle of our room as if we were on a slide in a playground instead of in the middle of cleaning a ridiculously-messy room. For a moment in time, it wasn’t “her mess” or “my mess.” It was “our memory-maker.”

To this day, I’m still unsure how that stack of clothes got so big. I’m pretty sure we were still wearing size 6x clothes at this point in time. Mom must have struck an incredible sale at Mervin’s or something.

And, to tell the truth, I have no clue how the stack of clothes got its name “The Tower of Babel.” I’m pretty sure no one left the room speaking a different language.

While we’re talking about it, I’m still very unclear as to if/how the room ever got cleaned that day. But that’s okay by me. Some days are more about the collecting up memories than cleaning up messes. And memories last a lot longer than messes, anyway. That’s pretty reassuring, if you ask me, because our messes sometimes did last for quite a long while.

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I don’t know if it was Roseann or if it was one of my other siblings; but somewhere along the bumpy path called childhood, one of the Hill siblings became famous coining the phrase, "You do the work, and I'll supervise!"

I always seemed to be the one on the receiving end of that statement, and I never liked it very much. Something about that equation doesn’t add up – unless you’re the "supervisor."

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Lately, I’ve been reading a book entitled “Love Does” by Bob Goff.

It sounds simple enough.

Because it is simple enough.

The main premise is that love is active and not passive.

Love.

Does.

Love cleans up messes – even when the mess isn’t “ours.”

Love does the work and lets others supervise. Without complaining.

Love lays down the clipboard and the stamp and gets in on the project.

Love eventually tears down the “Tower of Babel” and folds the clothes.

We all have messes in our lives, and we all see/know others who have messes in their lives as well. We’re all living-History-projects-of-sorts. At the end of the day, our messes may be packaged differently, but we all have the same options for how we handle them:

1. We can chose to push it off on others, do nothing about it, and wait-it-out. Hoping – and praying even – that someday “they” will see the errors of “their” ways and make things right and clean in our lives. My sister and I chose that approach many times as kids sharing a messy bedroom. Nothing good ever came out of it. The mess just seemed to grow with time.

2. We can let others “do all the work” on the messes in our lives while we just sit back and “supervise.” We can go-to-town stamping the clipboards of our made-up checklists for others to match up to. It may feel powerful for a little while, and it may even seem cool for a little while longer. But (much like the History project in my classroom) the roles of the project will soon change, how would you want the person holding the clipboard to treat you tomorrow? The same way you judged them today?

3. We can choose the path less traveled, walk out the path of MOST resistance, and feel the weight of what it truly means to love others in the midst of their messes like Christ loves the mess inside each one of us. We can choose to love. Love always does something about the mess. Love does.

I wonder... what MESS do you need to DO something about today? Is it yours? Is it someone else's? Was it a result of a joint-effort? At this point in the game, it really matters not.
There is beauty, fame, and fortune found in supervision, for sure. 
But love is a more clear picture of Christ to the world around us.

And love does.

- In closing -

Thank you, sister, for cleaning “the” mess (I’m still not owning it 100%... haha) out of “our” room, and thank you, even more, for loving the mess out of me.

Some of my most fond memories come from the messes I found myself in with you.  :-)