Am I Late?

If you have a scheduled meeting at 8 AM and you arrive at exactly 8 AM, are you late? 

Yes. No ifs, ands, or buts.  

The 8:00 AM schedule is for the meeting to start and not arrival time. 

This I learned the hard way when I was new in the workplace. I arrived at the meeting venue at exactly 8 AM and to my surprise, the chair (my boss) started presiding to everyone but me. I scampered for a vacant seat, trying not to make any noise, but my handbag fell to the floor and made a loud thud. 

Everyone looked in my direction, the boss stopped talking, and I wished to be swallowed by the ground! 

From then on, I make sure that I am at an event or meeting half an hour before the scheduled time—one hour, if I had a part in the program.  

This was why I was there, one hour before the scheduled time, for a seminar I facilitated at our church.

The extra 60 minutes gave me enough time to pray for guidance, set up my slides, check the sound system and air-conditioning, arrange the chairs for maximum interaction among the attendees, and other odds and ends.  

"Am I late?” was also one of the questions I asked in the seminar, which was designed to be reflective. I asked questions from beginning to end about proven theories to allow the attendees to self-reflect and come up with their own evaluation on how they are performing as teachers. 

Yes, the seminar was for teachers (Sunday School, VBS, evangelism, discipleship, and wherever there is a need to teach God’s Word). 

Because it was a self-reflective seminar, the title was interrogative: 

And the last question was: 

My own answers to this question is written in one whole book, published by CSM.  

(Details of the seminar are in another blog post.)