I remember as a young boy being drawn into the flickering black and white images of The Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night. For twenty-three years singers, dancers, comedians, tumblers, ventriloquists, Topo Gigio, Red Skelton, the Beatles, even the Rolling Stones were projected into living rooms across America.
Then there were the Plate Spinners. (make sure you’re playing the Plate Spinning music shown above to set the appropriate mood for this post!) If you’ve never seen this whirling dervish of activity, the performer would have a number of thin, long rods upon which he would put a plate. Once he set the first plate to spinning he would go to the next rod and put another plate on it and get it to spinning as well. This would be repeated again and again until he would have an entire row or rows of plates spinning at the same time.
Soon the plates would begin to slow down and wobble forcing the plate spinner to run quickly back and set them to spinning again. Eventually he would be running frantically back and forth trying to keep them all going. Even as a young boy I knew that sooner or later plates would start to fall and break with a satisfying (hey, I was a kid!) crash on the stage floor!
In churches across the country lay-leaders and volunteers are asked to take on additional projects prompting them to either say no to the project, split their time between projects, or allocating additional time for the new project; Plate Spinning. Which can and often does lead to burn out. Continue reading
