Keep the Plates Spinning

My mantra this week has been “Keep the plates spinning.”  When I was growing up, we had a VHS compilation of segments from “The Ed Sullivan Show” and in it, there was a plate-spinning act.  The idea was to see how many plates one could keep spinning at the same time. 

Plate-spinning was a one-person act, which upped the suspense level.  Could one person do it all alone?  It made for great entertainment, because of the potential for things to go wrong.  But what if there were more people involved?  What if, instead of just one person, there were multiple people, each trying to make sure all the plates kept spinning?  That could be just as disastrous.

Sometimes, there seems to be so much going on, it is a struggle to keep just a few plates spinning.  Other times, it is easier.  Sometimes the plates are on a counter or table with little risk of falling and shattering.  Other times the plates are spinning on sticks and the worst could happen at any moment.

The point is, when organizations are run effectively and efficiently, each person is responsible for their set of plates and their set of plates alone.  There is division of duties so that no one person has too many plates.  It makes a seemingly insurmountable task manageable.

I feel like we are in the middle of a plate-spinning act at St. Ambrose right now.  At least, that’s how it has felt on the administrative side of the parish.  There are so many programs to keep going, and at the moment our chief plate-spinner, Fr. Andrzej, has stepped away from the table.  It now falls to those of us who remain to “pick up the slack” as it were.

The important thing to realize is that, at the very core, we are invested in keeping our Church alive, even in the face of adversity.  There may be some fumbles and some slips along the way, but we will come out the other side of this difficult time.  The hope is that we come out stronger.  We just have to rely on one another a little bit more and be willing to help in whatever way we can.  We know that we can always rely on God’s help to resolve our difficulties.  It may not be in the way we want or expect, but He always listens and answers our prayers.