Our garage door opener bit the dust last year. It only took a couple of days of manually opening and closing this dusty garage door before I headed to “Homeowner’s Stuff-Mart” and bought a new garage door opener. The clerk said, “Would you like to install this miserable, impossible, heavy, unwieldy, dangerous, and complicated contraption yourself or would you like to have our installer do it for $100?” Why would he even ask? I had a friend who nearly decapitated himself doing a self-install on a door opener. One hundred dollars is a bargain in comparison to the cost of having my head re-attached.

The installer showed up on time to put in my new opener. This caused me a bit of angina. Kathi and I built our own home in Idaho—we were literally the general contractors—and I have never personally seen a subcontractor arrive on time. Never. We had subcontractors arrive days late—without bothering to call—and act like we were lucky that they came at all.

Not only did this young man arrive on time but he had a level of expertise at this job that was beyond impressive—it was spectacular. He was so good, so efficient, so competent, so skilled, and so organized that I literally stood there and watched him. It was like watching a sculptor. I kid you not. He was amazing. In the kindness of God I have plenty of good and meaningful things to do with my life but those things would have to wait so I could watch this magician. The man was expertise on steroids. Efficient motions. Exacting order of work. Total safety. Tools at hand. Experience on wheels. Nothing misplaced. Little tricks all along the way. Door perfectly and quickly adjusted. Opener properly programmed. Service sticker installed. Old opener and box cleaned up neatly and stashed in the back of his pickup. He even installed a light bulb in the door opener and wiped the plastic cover clean. The guy was a surgeon. The difference in my garage door opener installing expertise and his garage door installing expertise cannot be measured with any instrument yet invented by man. His expertise was stunning.

Perhaps the greatest trouble we cause ourselves is believing that we have all the expertise we need for success in everyday life, ministry, and relationships. The subconscious reasoning goes like this: “I am an adult. I am doing OK. I can do the things I need to do. I am trained for my career or field of work. I don’t need to really learn anything else. I know how to get my car fixed and how to renew my passport and how to file my taxes and how to fix my hair and how to read a map and how to check my email and even how to set the time on my DVD player after a power outage. I have the expertise I need and the good life I am living demonstrates this truth.”

I do not have all the expertise I need and I will bet you do not either. For example take the area of leadership: I had a little leadership skill when I was the president of the church youth group in Denver. The leadership skill and expertise and knowledge and instincts that I had back then would not come close to enabling me to lead at CBC. I have a great deal more leadership expertise now and it is only marginally enough. (I am in a two-year mentoring program with a Christian who specializes in the area of organizational leadership and organizational health. He and his associates are mentoring me in the area of Organizational Leadership and helping me to work on my leadership expertise issues.)

Consider some of the expertise you may need to gain in order to be more effective in your life and ministry and to have a greater level of self-control—to have greater spiritual and relational impact:

• Workspace organization—how does my space need to be organized for me to excel?
• Workflow organization—what tools and skills do I lack for managing my workflow?
• Work-style management—what kind of a work relationships and work environment do I need for my style of producing the work best?
• Conflict management—what skills do I lack for handling conflict well?
• Physical fitness—what simple changes in my basic lifestyle do I need?
• Financial fitness—what new things do I need to do in order to enhance my stewardship of all that God gives to me?
• Gaining relational intimacy—how can I make intentional progress on relationship intimacy?
• Emotional management—how do I manage my anger, anxiety, depression, and fear so as to preserve my own emotional energy and not harm others?
• Leadership skills—what basic principles of leadership do I not understand (trust building, vision casting, vision path, motivating, focusing, delegating, celebrating wins, modeling values, etc)?
• Sleep management—learning and using an effective sleep routine.
• Use of new technology—gaining the expertise to use the new tools in your field and in our technologically exploding culture.
• Priority management—gaining the expertise to decide what needs to be done next.
• Focus management—learning the tools and skills to make yourself focus on the task at hand.
• Decision making expertise—building a personal template for objective decision making.
• Systems thinking—how do systems like families and organizations work and therefore how do I interact with them and transform them effectively?
• Communicating—knowing how to communicate the essence of your message with power and focus and how to avoid the communication mistakes that weaken or completely erode a message.

These are some of the areas where I am trying to gain greater personal expertise and that is why they made the list. There are 8.4 dozen other areas where you may need to be gaining personal expertise—areas that I do not even know about. Gaining expertise is often slow going but it is worth going.

At the end of the day, friends, most of us do not have the expertise we need for the kinds of lives that we want relationally, physically, and spiritually. We do not have the expertise to honor and obey and serve God at the levels we should. People who abandon the pursuit of greater expertise get stuck where they are and being stuck means we lose a lot of joy.