Anyway, everybody is always directing us   
  

You have contributed heavily to our mission and are wondering why you haven't been asked to act as one of our advisors. Let me give you the bottom line.

Advisors are just ordinary people like you who have specific backgrounds and/or credentials.

Advisors are also imperfect, as are all Harmonic masters. They test what they want to hear; they sometimes fail to cure things; they get confused on what their next move is for their specific personal mission. You name it, it's wrong with them. And their advice is sometimes inferior to yours.
 

But you see, we don't lose your advice.

You're always advising us, too, just like an advisor does.

Everybody's always advising and directing us. You really are our colleagues.

Let me tell you something: Any communication that comes in here gets weighed. And the people who weigh those communications are competent. They're qualified to hear what you have to say. And they've been trained to implement your suggestions.

They know how we can do what you're advising. They flesh out your idea.


How do you think this site got put together?

Well, from a lot of telephone conversations. But partially also from your e-mails. We didn't even start using e-mail until we were well along in site design, but now whatever you say to us, via telephone or e-mail, gets used. If you've noticed, our telephone numbers are all over the site.

But an e-mail can be better. An e-mail sometimes is easier to implement, because we can just swipe and drop what you send us.

One thing you need to know: Anything you communicate to us instantly enters the public domain. There is no confidentiality unless the person you're talking to promises it to you - and even if you ask that what you send be kept confidential, there's no guarantee that the content of it will be, though your identity can be protected if you request it. We may feel that the information is too important, that it has too much potential impact on other people.

If we think something you've given us can help somebody else get well, we're going to compromise your privacy, because even though we are a ministry, we care more about your physical body than we do about your feelings. We don't want somebody to die in order to prevent you from getting your feelings hurt or save you some embarrassment.

We think that's a very unbalanced type of loyalty.

So if you request that something be kept private, it might be, but there's no guarantee. Because you are directing us. You are truly, always, directing us. And advising us. And so are thousands of other people you never hear about.

Did you know that even when you filled out your guest questionnaire, you were directing us? Because part of our direction comes from statistical realities. Statistics help us know what you need.

 
And also, we're always testing.

If you send in a suggestion and a week later you notice we've done exactly the opposite, that action may have been a response to your suggestion. That is, your suggestion came in an e-mail and one of us tested your idea. Your idea inspired a question. The staff member who got inspired asked the question of God via, probably, her fingers, and got an answer that was the opposite of what you thought she'd get. Then she asked some other people to test that same question. They or a preponderance of them came up with similar answers. Some of the people she asked were probably staff members, but it's also very probable that others were colleagues.

And a decision got made.

Your contribution? You inspired the original question.

That's what advising us - and directing us - looks like.

So you might as well get used to it. You can't help directing us. You can't stop directing us. You're always directing us. So is everybody. Because we are a community of practice.

Thank you,

Bayard

Bayard Barnes, an elder of WHUM