Peter Drucker, America's management guru, tells of a hospital administrator who held his first staff meeting. They worked through a rather difficult matter and the new boss felt the matter was settled. But then suddenly one of the staff asked, "Would this have satisfied Nurse Bryan?" The arguments immediately started all over again and did not stop until a better solution to the problem had been hammered out.

Who was this Nurse Bryan? The administrator soon found out. She had been a long serving nurse in the hospital. Whenever a decision regarding patient care came up, Nurse Bryan would ask, "Are we doing the best we can to help this patient?" As a result of her conscientious concern, patients on her floor did better and recovered faster. Gradually as time went by, the whole hospital learned to adopt what became known as "Nurse Bryan's Rule."

Though she had retired ten years earlier, the standard she had set was still providing vision for employees in the hospital today. Her secret? She took every aspect of hospital work back to the central question: "What can we do to best do our job as a hospital?"

St. Paul set the standard for us over 1900 years ago when he wrote that our goal is "to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it." That is our test of excellence in the church and in our lives as believers in Him. Would this be pleasing to Jesus?