Eight Minutes at an ATM and My Fitness to Lead

The sky loomed overhead like a pregnant elephant. The cold was beginning to flex its muscles, and the lack of sun that morning only encouraged it. We parked the car, walked the half block to the nearest ATM, and got in line. Having just come from our Russian class, Laura and I were talking in Spanish about Russian grammar. You wouldn’t believe the number of endings a single word in Russian can have depending on the context. But that’s another post. The man in front of us listened to us for a while, and then said in English, “Hello, where are you from?”

“We’re from Spain,” I told him curtly and in Spanish.

“Spain?” he said, again in English.

“Sí,” I told him.

Laura started to tell him something in English, and I cut her off.

“Only answer him in Spanish.”

Hopefully I’d conveyed enough snap to get the point across. At this point I’m tired of strange people starting up conversations with me just because I’m a foreigner and they want to practice English. I wanted to keep talking to Laura about Russian grammar. I didn’t want to provide free English lessons to a complete stranger on the street.

He told us he’d been to a couple of different countries in Europe.

“No Spain,” he said.

“Ah, you’ve never been to Spain, huh?” I said, sticking to Spanish.

Then it was his turn to pull out money from the ATM. He did so, and said as he turned to walk away, “OK, have a nice day.”

I didn’t answer.

Then it was our turn.

We knew we were going to take some time at this very busy ATM. Here, you almost always pay for cars and even houses in cash. Yes, in cash. I don’t know if there’s even any other way. We bought our house in cash three summers ago, and we bought our car in cash a year before that.

Because we’re in the process of selling our current car for a newer one, we needed to get the difference—$5000—out in cash. (Used cars here go for about double the price of what they’d cost in the US, and yes, ATMs in this country dispense both dollars and the local currency.) Currently we have two online bank accounts, and each of us has a card to access each account. That’s four ATM cards. Each card has a daily withdrawal limit of $500. The ATM we were at only lets you take out up to $300 in a single transaction. That meant that we were planning on doing two transactions, one for $300 and another for $200, for each of our four cards. The math gives you eight total transactions to reach the total daily withdrawal limit for the four cards for the day. We’d have $2000 of the needed $5000 and would have to come back the next day and the next to get the full amount.

Laura went first. She plugged through her four transactions and ended up with $1000. Then it was my turn. The line—correction, the blob—people don’t really do lines here—behind us was growing. Some gem of a human being yelled something in Russian. A woman yelled, “Time!” in English.

I turned and in the clearest Kyrgyz I was able to muster, I yelled back, “Wait!” (Which, in case you’re wondering, takes two words and a full six syllables to say where we only need one one-syllable word in English.)

I turned back around and continued working on my remaining transactions. After the people behind me started getting pushy, I immediately, purposefully slowed down.

“Hmm,” I wondered aloud to Laura. “Now, I’ve forgotten. Do we need som”—the local currency—”or dollars?”

She didn’t think it was funny.

“Let’s just ignore them and hurry up,” she said.

The people behind us must really have been in a hurry. The same man said something else. I didn’t understand him. Someone else said, more quietly, something about how we should have gone inside to do these transactions. Of course, they were talking out of utter ignorance. While most people here only go to the ATMs of the banks where they have an account, our cards allow us to go to any ATM, and we don’t have an account at the bank of the ATM we were currently at. That only made me angrier.

I turned around for the second time, and as loudly as I could, I again yelled, “Wait!”

I finally finished my four transactions, and Laura and I turned to leave. The jerk who’d yelled at us twice jeered at us again as we walked past him. Probably some Russian swear word. That time I didn’t say anything, and Laura and I walked to the corner. There we needed to split ways. I had another meeting in the city, and Laura was planning on going straight home.

To say that we were peeved would be like saying the guy in line had been somewhat disagreeable and I had been a little rude back.

“We should just ignore people like that and let them yell at the wall for all we care,” Laura told me.

I hardly saw that as the time for being level-headed. Visions of landing a solid right hook across the guy’s nose played in my mind’s eye. Laura and I parted ways, and I headed off down the street.

At some moment as I huffed and puffed along the busy sidewalk, two passages scrawled some 2,000 years ago by a former Pharisee—passages that I had just read not 12 hours before—crept into my mind.

“Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Timothy 3:2-4).

And, “[A]n overseer, as God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined” (Titus 1:7-8).

Sober-minded, adjective: “serious, sensible, and composed” (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/sober-minded).

Self-controlled, adjective: “restraint exercised over one’s own impulses, emotions, or desires” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-controlled).

Respectable, adjective: “decent or correct in character or behavior” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/respectable).

Gentle, adjective: “free from harshness, sternness, or violence” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gentle).

Quarrelsome, adjective: “apt or disposed to quarrel in an often petty manner; contentious” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quarrelsome).

Above reproach, idiom: “not calling for any criticism” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/above%20reproach).

Arrogant, adjective: “exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one’s own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arrogant).

Quick-tempered, adjective: “easily angered; irascible” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quick-tempered).

Hospitable, adjective: “given to generous and cordial reception of guests” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hospitable).

Upright, adjective: “marked by strong moral rectitude” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/upright).

Holy, adjective: “(of a person) devoted to the service of God; morally and spiritually excellent” (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/holy).

Disciplined, adjective: “showing a controlled form of behavior or way of working” (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/disciplined).

You have to be careful when reading a 2,000-year-old book that claims to be revelation from the living God. Sometimes it reaches out across all those centuries and smacks you right upside the head. In other words, there could be no weightier indictment against a person who purports to be a leader.

Yeah, but he started it! An exhaustive exegesis of the text reveals that that’s about as important as which way the wind was blowing that morning.

“When [Jesus] was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).

Ouch. My conscious began to sting almost as intensely as my pride.

Oh sure, “apt to teach” is a requirement listed for those who aspire to serve as an overseer of the flock. The parallel passage in Titus goes on to say that such a person must “be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.”

As a teacher by training, by nature, and by passion, I really like that requirement. I imagine many bookish people who like grammar and distinguishing the finer points of theology and philosophy do. That’s a requirement I can hang my hat on. Surely as a teacher I’d make the cut, right, Paul?

In the US at least, a four-year education can easily cost $100,000. I would never tell any person who goes through an education program (like I did to become a K-12 English as a second language teacher) or to a seminary (like so many aspiring other leaders do) in order to become “apt to teach” that he or she is wasting his or her time. Many men of God I greatly respect would agree.

And then, one dreary morning on a busy city street, I loose it not once but twice at an ATM.

In light of those seven or eight minutes at the ATM, I must ask myself if I’d also be willing to spend $100,000 and four years to become sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, gentle, not quarrelsome, above reproach, not quick-tempered, hospitable, upright, holy, or disciplined.

Stated that way, if I’m painfully honest, I don’t think I’d be willing to pay for self-control what I paid for my university education. I wouldn’t be willing to spend four years of my life learning gentleness like I spent four years learning to be an English teacher. Of course, that can only be due to some gross imbalance in me and in my estimation of what God desires from those who stand before him as leaders among his people.

And besides, even if I wanted to cultivate humility, for example, what exactly would I do? Somehow I haven’t seen a single seminary offering a course to help prospective shepherds learn that needed trait. The wonderful thing—or the absolutely terrible thing—it depends on how you look at it—is that God is the best teacher around. If a little more sober-mindedness or a little less arrogance is what you need to learn, he’s got a series of lesson plans for you. You’re already enrolled in his school after all. It’s called life. So you might as well start listening and taking notes.

As I look back on these past five and a half years here in Central Asia, I think in essence I’ve been in school. It’s not a school where we read books about humility. It’s the school in which you drink long and deep from the well of humiliation and crushed dreams and shattered self-confidence. You couldn’t learn humility from a book anyway, but since it’s a non-negotiable on God’s lists of desired traits for those who lead, he’ll make sure those whom he’s calling to such a post cover the curriculum. And wonder of wonders, he’ll be there at the end of each class to pick you back up, wipe the tears from your eyes, and embrace you in his arms of love.

They’re costly lessons for sure. I’d rather take out $100,000 in school loans and spend four years in a classroom. Alas, to learn most of life’s greatest lessons, there are no schools. Yet somehow God is committed to the rounded education we really need and ensures we’ll get it. And it is all grace that he does.

As you can tell from this pitiful confession, I’ve got a long way to go. I feel like I’ve moved an inch along a thousand mile race. But isn’t movement the point? “Not that I… am already perfect,” wrote the same Pharisee from 2,000 years ago—and you don’t need me to tell you that he covered some serious ground!—”But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14). The strain is the sign of new life, not perfection here and now.

Oh, God, have mercy. Create in me the heart you require. And I praise you for how patient of a teacher you truly are, especially with those whom you’re calling to teach.