WILSON BENTLEY WAS BORN and raised on a farm in Jericho, Vermont. As a young boy he developed a fascination for snowflakes. Most people seek shelter during snowstorms, but not Wilson. He would run outside when the flakes started falling, catch them on black velvet, look at them under a microscope, and take photographs of them before they melted. His first photomicrograph of a snowflake was taken on January 15, 1885.
Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.1
Wilson Bentley chased his dream for more than half a century, amassing 5,381 photographs that were published in his magnum opus, Snow Crystals. Then Wilson died a fitting death, a death that epitomized his life. Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley contracted pneumonia after walking six miles through a snowstorm and died on December 23, 1931.
I want to die that way! No, not from pneumonia. I want to die doing what I love to do, doing what God has called me to do. I want to pursue God-sized dreams until the day I die. And if it kills me, so be it. What a way to go!
I’m not convinced that our true date of death is the date listed on our death certificate. Sadly, many people die long before their heart stops beating. We start dying the day we stop dreaming. And ironically, we start living the day we discover a dream worth dying for.
That’s what the mighty men found in David—a cause worth living for, a dream worth dying for. If you don’t have a dream, get around people who do. You might just catch what they have. Dreams are highly contagious!
We know very little about Josheb-Basshebeth. He gets only one sentence of sacred text. But at some point, Josheb stopped lifting weights and started lifting his spear in David’s defense. It was no longer about going to the gym and admiring himself in the mirror. By the way, if you’re a gym rat, make sure it’s not a one-way mirror! I have a friend, one of our campus pastors, who flexed in front of a mirror for about five minutes, not realizing that a yoga class on the other side was watching the whole thing. I won’t mention his initials, but his name is Dave Schmidgall. They even clapped for him when he finished flexing!
Don’t read this the wrong way. I’m all for gym memberships. And the mighty men were mighty. But in my experience, working out for the sake of working out is demotivating. We need a goal to go after, like running a marathon or dropping two waist sizes. That’s when our workouts take on a new dimension of motivation.
I need a life goal to keep me going.
I need a noble cause to keep me committed.
I need a God-sized dream to keep me from getting demotivated.
We don’t die when our hearts stop beating. We die when our hearts stop skipping a beat in pursuit of our passions, when our hearts stop breaking for the things that break the heart of God.
One Verse
If you reverse-engineer the history of time, every atom in the universe can trace its origin back to the four words by which God spoke everything into existence: “Let there be light.” According to the Doppler effect, those four words are still creating galaxies at the outer edges of the universe.
In much the same way, there are genesis moments in every dream journey. A dream is implanted in your spirit by the Spirit of God, and the rest of your life is the ripple effect. It changes the plot line of your life forever.
For Wilson Bentley the genesis moment was the day his schoolteacher mother gave him a microscope. Wilson loved observing anything and everything under the scope. But growing up in the Snowbelt, with an average annual snowfall of 120 inches, he developed a special fondness for snowflakes.
At age sixteen Wilson learned about a camera that could be coupled with a microscope to take pictures. It took a year of savings to buy the camera. It took another year of failed attempts to capture his first photograph. What kept him going after each failed attempt? One verse of Scripture, Job 38:22: “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?”
This is one of fifty-one unanswerable questions that God asked during his pop quiz of Job.2 We read them as rebukes, and they are. The Omniscient One was putting Job in his intellectual place. But I also see them as leading questions, questions that summon us to scientific inquiry. It even says, “Stop and consider God’s wonders.”3 That’s precisely what Wilson Bentley was doing with each photomicrograph of a snowflake.
Wilson Bentley devoted his life to answering that one question, exploring the meaning of that one verse of Scripture. That one verse was the driving motivation of Bentley’s life. And his life became its interpretation. As one biographer noted, “The Great Designer found an interpreter in an insignificant country boy.”4
I’ve already shared this theory, but it’s worth sharing again: over time your favorite scripture becomes the script of your life. The promises of God become the plot line of your life. And the more you rehearse those lines, the more you get into character—the character of Christ. Your life becomes a unique interpretation of that life verse.
For Wilson Bentley it was Job 38:22.
For me it’s 2 Samuel 23:20.
What verse is your life exegeting, interpreting, translating?
Page 23
I recently had the privilege of speaking at Brooklyn Tabernacle. It’s famous for its choir, which has won six Grammys. But what’s impressive to me is the three thousand people who show up for their prayer meeting on Tuesday nights.
In the late 1800s, Brooklyn Tab had a six-thousand-seat church building. Over the subsequent century, the church gradually dwindled until thirty people were left. That’s when Jim Cymbala became pastor.
Jim was trying to turn the ship, but nothing he tried was working. “We couldn’t finesse it,” Jim said. “We couldn’t organize, market and program our way out.” That’s when Jim got a revelation from God on a fishing boat off the coast of Florida:
If you and your wife will lead My people to pray and call upon My name, you will never lack for something fresh to preach. I will supply all the money that’s needed…and you will never have a building large enough to contain the crowds I will send.5
God threw down the gauntlet, and Jim raised his spear!
It was a genesis moment for Jim and for Brooklyn Tab. He bet all his marbles on God’s promise in 2 Chronicles 7:14, and God has delivered. If you ever visit Brooklyn Tab, you better get there early. And that’s just to get a seat in the overflow room!
One footnote.
My friend Steven Furtick is a powerful preacher and a visionary leader. What was the genesis moment in his dream journey? Page 23 of Jim Cymbala’s book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, where it says, “I despaired at the thought that my life might slip by without seeing God show himself mightily on our behalf.” That one statement jumped off the page and into Steven’s spirit. Steven calls it his page 23 vision.6
My point? Steven’s vision for Elevation Church is a dream within a dream! Jim is Steven’s upline, and Steven is Jim’s downline. And I’m praying that God gives you a page 23 vision as you read Chase the Lion. If He does, leaf the page! It’s the beginning of a new chapter in your life.
Genesis Moments
English novelist Graham Greene ranks as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His sixty-seven-year writing career produced twenty-five novels. His life’s work was crafting storylines, which adds credence to my favorite sentence of his: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”7
What’s true in fiction is true in life.
There are genesis moments in every dream journey that radically change the plot line of our lives. It’s impossible to predict when or where or how they will occur. But once the door to the future opens, the door to the past slams shut. There is no turning back.
It’s a new day, a new normal.
One verse. One decision. One risk. One idea.
That’s all it takes.
The door to the future opened for me in a high school speech class. I gave a speech that doubled as my first sermon. I’m not sure any of my classmates had a revelation, but it was a genesis moment in my storyline. I’ve preached a thousand sermons since then, but that was the first.
Unbeknownst to me, my mom gave a copy of that speech to my grandma, who gave a copy to her Bible study teacher. That Bible study teacher, whom I never even met, gave it higher marks than my speech teacher! He asked my grandma, “Has Mark ever thought about ministry?”
At that point in my storyline, the answer was no. I hadn’t given ministry a single thought. But when that compliment was relayed from my grandma to my mom to me, it implanted a seed in my spirit, three levels down.
Don’t underestimate the power of one compliment.
One word of encouragement has the potential to change a person’s perspective on life, a person’s plot line for all eternity. And don’t just compliment people to their faces. Brag about them behind their backs! The right word at the right time can be the catalyst for someone else’s dream.
There is always a moment when the door opens—a genesis moment when God reveals Himself in a burning bush on the backside of the desert, a genesis moment when God knocks you off your horse on the road to Damascus, a genesis moment when God shows off His power at Pentecost.
For David the genesis moment was the day a prophet showed up unannounced on his family’s front doorstep.
For Benaiah it was chasing a lion into a pit on a snowy day. That split-second decision opened the door to the future—a job as King David’s bodyguard. And that door opened another door—commander in chief of Israel’s army.
For Josheb-Basshebeth it was raising his spear against eight hundred of David’s sworn enemies. That one act of two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage opened the door and earned him a seat of honor at David’s round table. Not one of David’s mighty men outranked Josheb.
Impossible Odds
“May the odds be ever in your favor.”
That is the motto of the Hunger Games, but that isn’t how it works in the kingdom of God. It’s more like “May the odds be ever against you.” Impossible odds set the stage for God’s greatest miracles! And apparently God loves long shots.
Isn’t that why He removed 9,700 soldiers from Gideon’s army?
Isn’t that why He let the fiery furnace be heated seven times hotter?
Isn’t that why He didn’t show up until Lazarus was four days dead?
If the Israelites had defeated the Midianites with an army of 10,000, I’m sure they would have thanked God. But I bet they would have taken some of the credit themselves. So God cut the army down to size. He let Nebuchadnezzar turn up the heat. He let Lazarus lie in a tomb for four days. Why? To ensure He got all the credit, all the glory.
We tend to avoid situations where the odds are against us, but when we do, we rob God of the opportunity to do something supernatural.
We read right past it, but Josheb raised his spear against 800. If you want to appreciate how many people that is, try singing “800 Philistine soldiers in the field, 800 Philistine soldiers. Take one down, do it again, 799 Philistine soldiers in the field.”
Those are some long odds! But that’s how one man became chief of David’s mighty men. He beat 800-to-1 odds!
When was the last time you attempted something that was destined to fail without divine intervention?
When National Community Church was just a year old, we gave away fifty thousand pounds of groceries to five thousand guests at our first Convoy of Hope outreach. We knew we needed four hundred volunteers to pull it off, and our average attendance was less than a hundred people. We were in way over our heads, but several area churches rallied around us, and a thousand people crossed the line of faith! It was a banner day! Why? Because we raised our swords, even when the odds were against us.
Just when I think I’m dreaming big, God often does something that reveals how small my dream is in comparison to His omnipotence. In the past decade God has performed one real-estate miracle after another for NCC. We’ve acquired half a dozen properties despite the fact that property goes for about $14 million an acre in our neck of the woods. The latest miracle was a $29.3 million castle on Capitol Hill. I didn’t have a category for a city block, and I certainly didn’t have a category for the price tag! Plus, we were up against an investment firm that offered cash. It felt like 800-to-1 odds!
The odds were not in our favor, but that’s how God gets more glory.
The Genesis Question
Brian Grazer is an accomplished film producer with forty-three Academy Award nominations to his credit. I like many of Brian’s movies, but I love his approach to life even more. He revealed one secret to his success in his book, A Curious Mind. For decades Brian has had what he calls “curiosity conversations” with successful people, ranging from scientists to spies. “Life isn’t about finding the answers,” Brian said. “It’s about asking the questions.”8
Like Brian, I love questioning people about their dream journeys. And my favorite question is what I call “the genesis question.” Even more than stories, I love backstories. So I ask this question: What was the genesis of your dream?
The first time I asked the genesis question was at a dinner with pastor and author Rick Warren. There were twenty-five of us, sitting at multiple tables, so I didn’t want to monopolize Rick’s time. But as a new author I wanted to hear about the genesis of his runaway bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life.
Before Rick was offered a contract to write that book, Saddleback Church initiated a building campaign. As the pastor of the church, Rick wanted to set the standard, so he and his wife, Kay, pledged the equivalent of three years of his salary to the campaign. Shortly after making that pledge, Rick signed a two-book deal for The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life.
The advance was the same dollar amount as the pledge!
Coincidence? I think not. And considering that The Purpose Driven Life is one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time, I dare say Rick has recouped his advance. Knowing that backstory made me respect Rick all the more.
How has The Purpose Driven Life become one of the best-selling nonfiction books in history? Well, how readers will respond to a book is a bit of a mystery, as every author knows. The Purpose Driven Life certainly hit a nerve ending, a deep-seated desire for purpose. But here’s my take: God has honored Rick’s books because Rick honored God with a pledge. That three-year pledge was a genesis moment. And for the record, every act of generosity is! If you want God to do something beyond your ability, try giving beyond your means. It’s a great starting point, a leverage point.
On a much smaller scale, I believe that God has honored In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day because of a $5,000 pledge my wife and I made to missions on July 31, 2005. That faith promise didn’t fit in our budget, but we believed that God would somehow provide what we promised. Sixty-five days later I signed my first book contract.
The book deal was a dream come true, but so was writing a $5,000 check to missions! And I believe it was our pledge that made the writing dream come true.
It was our way of raising the spear like Josheb.
It was our way of chasing the lion like Benaiah.
Every God-sized dream has a genesis—a God-ordained opportunity, a God-given passion. But at some point you need to raise your spear of faith. That’s how the door opens and lets the future in.
What spear do you need to raise?
What odds do you need to defy?
What verse do you need to interpret with your life?