Drunk with Power
Mark's face displayed a combination of shock, horror, and fear. His glance at me revealed that I indeed held his very being in the palm of my hand. I relished the power for a tiny second, then saved his soul with my answer...
Mark Kinkle was a fraternity brother I had invited home with me for the weekend. Clemson University was about a two-hour drive from my home in Waynesville, North Carolina. The shortest way home would take me mostly on two-lane mountain roads, but I had stopped traveling that way during my freshman year, because the curves along with my love for speed combined to give me something on the order of 14,000 miles per set of tires. Mark however was a city-slicker from Louisville, and he wanted to see the mountains so we took the mountain roads.
As we were driving home, I thought I would give Mark a special treat. We would take a short five-mile excursion to visit one of my relatives, John D. Davis, a true Smokey Mountains farmer, who lived with his wife Mary in a small wood-framed farmhouse in Big Ridge, North Carolina. John D. and Mary were country as dirt. He typically wore bib overalls as he worked around the farm. Life Magazine had done a spread on John D. during the 1960s as a feature on the poor Smokey Mountain farmer, showing John D. plowing up a cabbage field with a mule. What the piece did not report was that John D. was also on the board of directors for a bank and probably had the first dime he ever earned.
We pulled up to the house and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. As we were walking off the porch, we heard someone hooting from down the road. We looked and saw John D. and Mary coming toward the house reaching down under the bank over the road, gathering eggs from where their chickens were nesting. John D. hollered for us that they would be right there. As they made their way on the porch John D. greeted me, I introduced Mark, and Mary didn't say a word. John D. invited us in the house into the living room. Mary was still silent.
In the living room there were two easy chairs with arm rests worn from years of service. Next to each easy chair was a large, discolored coffee can. I recognized these cans immediately as spittoons. They fit the setting perfectly to me having grown up chewing tobacco. Mark didn't realize it, but he was standing right next to Mary's spittoon. She stepped over next to him, leaned over the spittoon and slowly spit out a nice long string of black-brown, very dark tobacco juice. She had obviously been saving that one up for a while. Mark's face was frozen. It was petrified with horror. I realized right then, in his city-slicker days, he'd never seen a woman spit like that before.
The first words from Mary's mouth were, “George, are you'ins gonna stay fer dinner?” Suddenly the shock on Mark's face was mixed with fear, and he looked at me, eyes wide... I know how the cat feels when it has a mouse in its paws as a plaything. The slight pause I took to answer Mary must have seemed longer to Mark. I hesitated just long enough to make sure Mark knew that I knew. I looked him in the eyes and smiled. “Mary, we would love to... but Mom's expecting us for dinner. Thanks anyway! We just wanted to stop by and say hello.”
There is a lesson in this story on power. Power can and often does intoxicate those who wield it. This brief experience with power over Mark revealed to me just how much I enjoyed it and the potential of how dangerous this could be. Power needs to be managed carefully with accountability to others. We need to see power as the opportunity to serve others. Matthew 23:11 records Jesus as saying that “the greatest among you will be your servant.” When I look at my sales team, I need to be thinking, “How can I best serve them?” It doesn't mean that I do their jobs for them, but I look at what I can do to help them be successful. When I use my power to make others successful, I've really done my job.
Posted at 08:03AM Feb 25, 2009 by George Miller in Personal | Comments[0]