Big-Picture Vs Logistics People

Are we called to be both?

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

I was writing down my tasks for the day—pick up children’s Tylenol, check to be sure my daughter has enough shorts, make kids practice their math facts, make a weekly meal plan, start reading a book on homeschooling, etc.—when I realized I had no oomph to do any of these tasks. The very idea of them was sucking the life out of me. There seemed to be no scope, no vision or beauty! Just mindless drudgery.

Then the Lord brought to mind what I’ve been contemplating with him recently. It just happens to shed light on my list-making glums. I’ve been thinking about the difference between big-picture people and logistics people.

Big-picture people step back, see the whole picture, inspire a vision, and set goals. Logistics people are good at figuring out how to make things happen and getting those things done. I’ve been thinking about how the two are related and what it means to be Christ-like.

Was Christ a big-picture person or a logistics person? Or both? It seems like he was both. He had a vision for the Kingdom of Heaven and was also a hands-on, let’s-talk-about-logistics kind of guy. The Bible records some fascinating details that Jesus explained to people.

If Jesus was a mixture of both, doesn’t this mean God wants us to be a mixture of both too, regardless of our natural inclinations? And if so, doesn’t that mean that the two are related? That they are interdependent upon one another? That, according to God’s standards, we can’t really be good at logistics without having God’s big picture in mind? And that we can’t really have God’s big picture in mind without being good at logistics? I think we were made to be good at both, like Christ was.

Big-picture people who aren’t good at logistics are often out of touch with reality. They can lack compassion and understanding for people’s individual needs. They can be impractical and seemingly unwilling to help or even realize that small tasks need to be done. They have big ideas but they can’t seem to make them happen. On the other hand, logistics people often get buried in the work and lose their purpose. They can become robotic in action, task-orientated, hopeless, joyless, and fail to see how to do things differently.