Saying Goodbye #10: Treasures • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 1

Saying Goodbye #: 10TreasuresSome of my goodbyes have been too complex and too private to share here and they were beginning to take a toll on me.

I decided I needed to add some happy goodbyes to the mix, to fill my tanks before the marathon of August. I put some gas in my car and hit the road for some face to face encounters, not really to say goodbye, but to celebrate some of the high points in the California chapter of my life.

This evening, I am savoring one of my young lions. She is MADE for fathering and it is a joy to watch her creativity.

She has a highly unusual walk with God and has no one in her current community to share it with. So today, I provided ears and she did a cheerful dump. We walked. She talked about God, community, work, health and future, spiced with sundry side trips.

We talked like a zigzag mixed into a pretzel built by a pair of Golden Retriever puppies squabbling over a ball. It was easy to go from the granular, to the view from 30,000 feet and back again within two sentences and 15 seconds!

One of the most valuable resources in SLG is people who can reason from principle.

As she talked through the various people in sundry situations whom she is fathering, I smiled with deep pleasure as she again and again described a real life situation, moved to the abstract to fetch a couple of principles from her ample storehouse, then described how she dressed them up in secular clothes and applied them to the situation.

It was especially intriguing to watch the art form of fathering her bosses at times.

She is formidable and artistic, simultaneously.

A delight.

We laughed and cried and did high fives as the emotions swirled around us.

Saying Goodbye #10: Treasures • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 2

One of her peeps has remarkably high potential spiritually, but is in a complicated construct. We brainstormed some additional strategies she could use to identify the core of his design, so she could get to work on developing it.

Her life is non-linear, much to the consternation of well meaning community that so dearly wishes she would settle down and make them comfortable by being ordinary.

But she is, in reality, extraordinary, and her friends are just going to have to get over trying to fix her because God is having too much fun unpacking the treasure that she is.

He has recently enrolled her in yet another highly inexplicable “class” which will keep her from using a lot of previously developed skills. She is going to have to learn a whole new set of skills in this class and neither one of us really has a clue who she is going to be when she grows up.

My personal opinion is that she is being groomed for some extraordinary task. I don’t think she will make the pages of the history books, but she will show up at some destiny-changing moment, with a collection of insights, a remarkable depth of relationship with God and a formidable set of abilities. As a Special Forces operative, she will be the one person in the universe who can step into a particular moment to execute a task that matters to God.

I decided that when I get my turn at the archives in heaven, I am going to skip looking at my files with all the questions I still have and go look at hers first, to see if she has had her epic encounter yet.

It will be worth reading.

Another emotionally gratifying visit was with a researcher. She and I have walked together since she was single. Before she married, the two of them purposed to make their family a lab for principles. They have been more intentional and more expansive at implementing things in their family than any other couple I know.

The results are wonderful.

We spent some time catching up on her family. I so loved watching her enjoy her joy as she interfaced with each of the children in a unique way.

Then we turned to her heart.

For many years she puzzled me. She was top notch at implementing. And her life blossomed as she leaned into this spiritual discipline and that, while holding down a rather mundane day job.

I could not understand how she could exist with such an immense engine and a micro-transmission.

Saying Goodbye #10: Treasures • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 3

Eventually, she finally, gloriously, discovered she was utterly bored with her job, so she pitched it and began to pursue her birthright instead.

God promptly enrolled her in three classes without asking her permission, and life was quite compli-cated for a while. But — as always happens when God is in the mix — out of the fire came a much clearer perspective of her passion and who she is going to be when she grows up.

So we talked about her heart passion and the research she has been doing. She voiced her frustration over having to research heaven’s wisdom in the sludge of humanism.

I pulled her out of the granular and took her to a cosmic view of history. This gave her a renewed sense of dignity, passion and focus.

I was able to share a few warm potato skins with her since I have dabbled in a couple of the areas that interest her.

It was glorious to watch her engine roar to life and lean into the implications of those principles.

We ended by reminiscing about one of our grand adventures together, years ago.

I drove away with a deep, settled peace. My seed has been sown in good soil.

The Young Lion and the Researcher are just two who have “ignition.” If I never invest anything more in them, they already have the tools and the skills to find the principles that will unlock the truths they need, and they have the passion to run hard after their birthrights.

But they are not just technicians in the Kingdom. They are wonderful people. I love them both.

Copyright July 2018 by Arthur Burk