Yesterday, I had to employ some not so subtle “wrap this meeting up already” techniques. If you don’t spend a lot of time in meetings at work, please allow me to enlighten you.
Sometimes, people will plan a 30 minute meeting and try to accomplish 14 weeks of conversation in it. When you hit the 29 minute mark you realize that:
A. You are going to miss your next meeting.
B. You are going to miss lunch or
C. You would sooner chew your right arm off instead of spending another minute trapped in the meeting.
Unfortunately, it’s not polite to yell, “Come on! We have 10 seconds left and 19 agenda items to cover, let’s end this thing already.” Or maybe you can if you’ve got an office with an actual door or a business card with a smattering of Alphabet soup importance on it, e.g. VP, SR, CEO, PHD, CIO etc. Surprisingly enough, I possess neither of these things.
So instead of throwing my weight around, which is pretty much non existent, I’ve developed some not so subtle techniques to let the meeting organizer know that I am mentally crouching into my chair like a sprinter in the starting blocks just waiting to burst out of that room when the clock strikes noon. And I realized that they might be equally useful in church.
Maybe your pastor just wants to flow some Sunday. He finished his main point already and is just up there talking. It’s the last service of the day and it’s not that the spirit is moving him, it’s that he has a captive audience and nothing stopping him. You can’t just yell “Come on! We have 10 seconds left until noon and we’ve already filled in all the blanks in the sermon notes, let’s end this thing already.”
If you do find yourself in that situation, and you might Thursday since I’m speaking at Off the Blogs, feel free to try one of these moves:
1. Close your Bible as loud as you can.
One of the first things I do to let someone know that we’ve gone over our allotted time in a meeting is close my notebook. And it’s not just an average notebook. It’s a five star, college ruled of course, so I’m pretty sure the impact of that is felt by everyone in the room. Same thing goes with your Bible. If it’s open on your lap, loudly close it. It’s the church equivalent of slapping your hands together and saying “done and done!” This works even better if you’ve got a zipper around your Bible cover. That is the equivalent of when college students wave their car keys at the opposing team during a basketball game to let them know, “Game is over, time to warm up the bus.” As a speaker, if I heard a chorus of zippers ringing out from the crowd I would know, it’s go time.
2. Start scooting toward the end of the aisle.
In a meeting, I’ll wheel my chair back slowly from the table to indicate I am pulling away from the meeting. (I’ve thought long and hard about wheeling it all the way out the door and down the hall, but haven’t yet.) You can do the same thing at church. Slowly but surely start sliding toward the end of the aisle. Don’t rush it or the people next to you will pick up on it and actively push against you, but gently start sliding against them. If you have a pew, eventually like human dominoes, the combined pressure is going to squish the person on the very end so much that they pop out like a golf ball through a fire hose right into the middle of the aisle. You can then get up to see if they’re OK and walk to the back of the church during all the confusion.
3. Clap.
In a meeting, even if we’re not done, I’ll start thanking people for inviting me to it. I’ll start talking about the meeting in past tense to try to will the meeting to an end with the power of my words. “Great meeting today. That was good. Thanks for inviting for me. I am glad I was able to come to it and heard what you had to share. It was very productive.” Sometimes my “was” is so intoxicating that like hypnosis I can convince the meeting organizer that the meeting is something historical, a moment that has already passed instead of something that is still going on and on and on. Granted you can’t throw out “was” from the crowd like Paula Abdul throws out compliments on American Idol, but you can start clapping. Just stand up right where you are and begin a slow clap. The hope is that you’ll inspire other people to stand up and start doing it with you like at the end of the movie Dead Poet’s Society where one by one a handful of students stand up on top of their desks in support of their fired teacher Robin Williams. If no one joins you, tell your pew neighbors, “Clapping is my love language. Every Sunday is pastor appreciation day for me. What? You didn’t like the sermon?”
These might work at your church, they might not. I can promise though that if you try them on Thursday while I’m speaking at Off the Blogs they won’t work. Because when I get nervous I crank up the sarcasm to 11, that’s right like Spinal Tap the dial goes to 11, and I often blurt out 90s rap lyrics as a defense mechanism. So if you start clapping in the middle of my flow expect me to yell back, “Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years” and you’ll be confused so I’ll yell back, “that’s Uncle L” only you’ll forget that Uncle L is a nickname for LL Cool J and so I’ll have to yell back, “the guy that was in that shark movie where the sharks could cure Alzheimer’s but they also ate Samuel L. Jackson’s head, remember that one?” And then at that point the whole night will unravel and all three of us will be embarrassed. Me, you and Samuel L. Jackson. So please don’t clap.
