I am so grateful to be around people who are way smarter than I. I am equally grateful that there are mentally healthy friends, older than I am, who have lived life and are ready and willing to share wisdom when needed.

There was a conversation a few weeks ago about the problems in our communities, our schools, our churches, and so on.  Since I’ve lived in communities and worked at both schools and churches, I was all ears.

These guys, who are part of the “Baby Boomers,” were born in the early 1950s. For those of you who don’t know, “Boomers” were born between 1946 and 1964, and most of them are getting ready to pass on some things to other people.

Or are they?

These wise guys, and I really mean that, said the problem with “Boomers” these days is that they are not willing to hand anything off.  As another friend said it one day, “They want to pass the baton but they don’t want to let go of the baton.”

I’ve seen it time and time again.  You have people who have run organizations or groups for years, and when the time comes to step down and retire, they don’t think anyone can handle it the way they’ve always done it, and so they either keep doing it, often reluctantly, or decide to hand it off and criticize how the new folks are doing it.

I can remember being in high school and working on the school newspaper. My junior year, the senior staff was convinced that we would not be able to handle the ins and outs of producing the school paper when we became seniors. They listed many reasons and left gloom and doom messages to the advisors about how the entire operation would fall apart without them.  

They graduated and left, and the paper went on without them and did just fine.

But in full transparency, I must be honest and tell you that we, the new senior staff, had the same thoughts about next year’s staff as we were on our way out.  We thought they wouldn’t be able to handle things. It was a replay of the year before and we were saying the same things that the senior staff had offended us with the previous year.

But, guess what? We graduated and left, and the paper went on without us and did just fine.

Church ministries that are run by the “Boomers” and older folks that are in place now will fall by the wayside in a few years unless those in charge now give up their pride and their “way of doing things” and begin training the next bunch. 

People decide they are “stepping down” all the time, yet they haven’t thought about the future of the organization they are running and have not made plans to train someone new.  Those of us who have run things for a long time should hang around for a while to make sure things are OK but after that, we have got to bite our lips and maybe even sit on our hands and let the next group get it done.

It isn’t easy. I’m as big a control freak as the next guy.

But my question is this:  How are we to go on and on if we aren’t willing to let new blood and new ideas come into play? Are we so prideful that we really think the way we did it was the “be all, end all?”  

Before I left teaching, I suggested a Language Arts program I thought was pretty great. For the most part, my teaching team liked the program. We always had people on board who weren’t willing to be team players and therefore it was like pulling teeth to get everyone to fully embrace anything new. I rarely suggested things to my teaching team, but I was pretty sold on this no-nonsense program.

Fast forward.  One of my friends on the team told me recently that a few of the team I left had thrown the program out completely. For a while I was offended, but only for a short while. What do I care? So they didn’t like it. I am not the person who wrote the program. I had success with it and so did a few others.  Maybe whatever new program or plan is used will work better. I’m not there, nor do I have to grade any of those papers anymore.  

The more I talked to myself, the better I felt.

Sometimes it is just best to make a graceful exit.