Goodnight Zoom … How a Five-Year Old’s Questions Inspired a Way to Explain our Unknown Future

While watching PBS NewsHour last night I was touched by Stefanie Trilling’s creative response to her five-year-old daughter’s questions. Whenever her daughter heard an ambulance siren she’d ask, “Does this mean someone inside the ambulance has coronavirus? Are they going to be okay?” Trilling took out her paint set, and reimagined children’s book covers for the pandemic. She discussed how each book cover gives people something to look forward to in these uncertain times.

Trilling isn’t an artist. Sharing her work took courage. It also takes courage to do comprehensive congregational planning. It’s a journey of faith. Members are eager to know the answers before we ask the questions. Others are anxious and believe Leadership has the answers and isn’t sharing them.
Over two decades and hundreds of projects, REALM Group has learned that the destination of this journey—the culmination of a client’s planning—is a comprehensive, realistic, implementable, and long-term sustainable solution. The specifics are revealed through the key steps of our process: research, educate, engage, and co-create. These create the framework, like Trilling’s book covers, to explore the unknown future.

We don’t promise your planning will be easy. We can pretty much guarantee it won’t. Congregational planning requires commitment. It takes reading and responding to our real-time updates on research, innovators, and thought leaders. This information opens the realm of possibilities to co-create a preferred future. Trilling does her painting while working and parenting full-time. When the rest of her family is asleep, she takes out her pencils, paints, paper, and gets to work. Likewise, congregational planning occurs alongside all your other duties.

Are you ready to challenge the status quo, to explore your future with eyes and heart wide open? Are you open to risking the comfortable and embracing the bravery of your foundress, those who’ve gone before you, and those who stand with you today? If “YES!”, then REALM Group would be honored to partner with you on this journey. You’ll learn about yourself and others. You’ll have a place to nurture yourself and explore unimagined ideas. You’ll have a place to investigate them in all their maddening ambiguity, to seek and find your future.

What if, like Trilling, you are about to create a future where your mission and charism exponentially touch people? A five-year-old daughter’s questions were able to inspire a quarantined mom with no painting experience to touch over 15 million people across the globe. What are you waiting for?