By Dale Sellers

I grew up around the construction business. Dad was a successful home builder who built hundreds of homes during my childhood. I spent every summer and holiday on the job site. My life’s goal was to have my own home-building business one day too. Therefore, at eighteen years old, I got my residential builder’s license.

As much as I loved working with my hands, I was always fascinated with heavy machinery. It was so cool to watch a bulldozer move dirt around while grading a lot for a new home. I would have become a heavy-machinery operator if I hadn’t chosen to become a carpenter.

My fascination with heavy equipment led to one of the worst situations of my life in my mid-thirties. Our family was in the process of building a log home. When you purchase a log home package, the company sends all the materials to your job site on large trucks. The buyer is in charge of securing a forklift in order to unload them. We rented the biggest forklift I have ever seen. The tires were as tall as me. It was awesome. Not wanting to take a chance on causing a delay for the truck drivers, I had the forklift delivered a day early. That was when my situation began.

The temptation to “practice” operating the forklift was more than I could resist. After all, I needed to make sure I understood how it worked. Wouldn’t that be the responsible thing to do? So I hopped into the driver’s seat and spent the next several hours “practicing.” Of course, I was just playing on a big piece of machinery … and, boy, was it fun—until I stalled out in the mud.

In my effort to test how far the boom arm would reach, I didn’t notice that I had begun to sink. The more I moved back and forth, the deeper the forklift sank. Finally, it was so deep that the undercarriage was sitting on the ground and all four tires were spinning. The more I tried to get free, the more stalled I became. By then it was six o’clock in the evening, and there were three trucks full of materials scheduled to arrive the next morning at seven. How would we unload them now?

I sat there thinking about the mess I’d gotten myself into. The look on my face said it all. How could I have been so irresponsible? This is 100 percent my fault. The pressure continued to build as I realized what I had to do next because there was no other option.

When you find yourself stalled out, the best thing you can do is reach out for help. I called a friend, who came and pulled me out with his bulldozer. Without question, that was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life.

When you find yourself stalled out, the best thing you can do is reach out for help. I called a friend, who came and pulled me out with his bulldozer. Without question, that was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life.

The hardest part was having to own up to what led me to become stalled in the first place. I was trying to do something I hadn’t been trained to do. I thought I could handle it on my own and just wing it without any supervision. Obviously, my thinking was wrong.

I experienced the same feeling a few months later while I was pastoring a small church. Our little congregation grew from thirty to three hundred. However, it went back down to one hundred fifty because of a nasty church split. That split revealed three key areas of my leadership that had played a part in the problem. I was unable because of a lack of training, unaware of what was really happening, and unfulfilled by what I was accomplishing.

(Sellers, Dale. Stalled: Hope and Help for Pastors Who Thought They’d Be There by Now (pp. 23-25).

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