*Warning: If you are a missionary in a Muslim country (or Israel) and miss eating bacon with your eggs for breakfast, this post may make you feel hungry and/or homesick.

Ever seen those commercials that compare everyday life with investing? I always thought they were a little goofy, but sometimes clever.

I had that kind of moment today. You see, on Saturday, since I was a kid, I like to cook bacon and eggs for the family. I did it as a teen for my Mom and Dad, and do it now for my wife and kids. Truth is, I am awesome at cooking bacon. It is always cooked through and still soft and tasty. So as I cooked a full package this morning, I thought through my principles of bacon and realized they lined up with something else that I have had on my mind lately… namely, the IMB Board of Trustees conflict.

So here are my thoughts…

What can cooking bacon teach us about dealing with difficult situations with closed door politics?

Low heat is critical. Putting the burner on high will create a situation where the bacon will burn before you know it. The slow simmer will reward you with great bacon and good results when dealing with confrontation. Too much heat in a confrontation will create a situation that becomes explosive and damages everything, leaving us with nothing worth having. (Yes, this is me on simmer, and I have very much been watching the fire closely.)

The first pieces grease the pan and are critical. If you don’t want to burn these first pieces, you need to tend them closely. All the other pieces will fry in the grease from this first batch. As they cook without grease already in the pan, you risk them as well as risk leaving the taste of burned grease in the pan souring the taste of what is yet to come. For us, if we handle this first confrontation of conservative vs. conservative within the SBC poorly, we will have the sour taste of it in the SBC for some time to come and could leave us severely, or even permanently, damaged.

Constant attention gives perfect results. Ignoring the bacon will burn it and picking it out of the grease too early will leave it uncooked – which is not what you want with either bacon or confrontation. We will need to focus our conversation on this topic consistently between now and the SBC in Greensboro. The March meeting of the BOT in Tampa is important, but there is much more that we will not know until after those meetings. Developments will be ongoing for a long time and I daresay that the SBC will have more than we can imagine.

Anything to add?

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