IN THE SUMMER OF 1957, twelve-year-old Ed Catmull was driving cross-country with his family to Yellowstone National Park. As they zigzagged on a canyon road with no guardrail, a car driving in the opposite direction drifted into their lane. Ed remembers his mom screaming, his dad swerving. They came within two inches of driving off the cliff, game over.

That’s how close we came to missing Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Up. Why? Because Ed Catmull is the founder and president of Pixar Animation Studios. So as I see it, no Ed means no Toy Story, Toy Story 2, or Toy Story 3.

Looking back on that close call, Ed Catmull said, “Two more inches—no Pixar.”1 But it’s not just Pixar’s animated movies that would have gone missing. Ed noted, with no small measure of satisfaction, how many Pixar employees have met, married, and had what he calls Pixar kids. “All those Pixar couples have no inkling of the two inches that could have kept them from meeting or their children from being conceived.”2

Life is a game of inches!

It’s two-inch events that change our trajectory.

After a few too many drinks, Dee Duncan was standing on a street corner in Georgetown at two o’clock in the morning. A cab pulled up, Dee got in the backseat, and the driver said, “You were doing something you shouldn’t have been doing, weren’t you?” That’ll sober you up in a hurry! The cabby-prophet said, “I never drive in this area of town, but the Lord told me to turn down this street, that there was someone He needed to talk to.”

As he drove Dee across town to his apartment, he told him that God had a plan and purpose for his life. He also told him he needed to find a church. The very next day Dee walked into National Community Church for the first time. He started attending regularly, got plugged into a small group, and even went on a mission trip to Zambia with one of my children. But my favorite part of the story is the day he sat two inches from a girl named Anna. A few years later Dee got up on stage after one of our services, got down on one knee, and asked Anna if he could have her hand in marriage.

Now rewind the tape.

What if that taxi driver hadn’t obeyed that little prompting to turn down that street at that moment? I don’t think Dee would have found National Community Church. And while I don’t want to belittle the sovereignty of God one iota, I’m not sure Dee would have found Christ or Anna either.

What I am sure of is this: God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time. Of course, it often seems like the wrong place at the wrong time. But like a grand master who strategically positions his pawns, bishops, kings, and queens, God is setting you up.

Let me put my cards on the table. I don’t believe in coincidence, not if you are living a Spirit-led life. I believe in Providence. I believe in a sovereign God who is ordering your footsteps, preparing good works in advance, and making all things work together for good. Of course, some things won’t make sense until we cross the space-time continuum and enter eternity. In the meantime don’t worry about meeting the right person. Focus on becoming the right person. If you keep doing the right things day in and day out, God will hold up His end of the bargain!

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear crazy stories about God’s sovereignty. And some of them start out as mistakes, like Dee having a few too many drinks. I recently heard about a woman who ordered a single copy of The Circle Maker, but we accidently shipped her an entire case. I don’t recall this, but evidently I told her to keep the case. She gave those books to people when she felt a prompting, and eight of them put their faith in Christ.

You can call it human error.

I call it supernatural synchronicity.

It may seem insignificant, but it’s a providential preposition: Eleazar was with David when they taunted the Philistines. In other words, he was in the right place, at the right time, with the right person. And it was no coincidence. It was a two-inch event that changed the trajectory of his life.

I love the scene in Back to the Future Part II when Doc Brown says to Marty McFly, “Obviously the time continuum has been disrupted, creating a new temporal event sequence resulting in this alternate reality.”3

It’s not science fiction; it’s fact.

It’s not a script; it’s Scripture.

It’s not an accident; it’s a divine appointment.

Can I make a simple observation? Notice who’s next to you! What you think is a seat assignment might be a divine assignment. The person two inches away may change your destiny, or you might change theirs!

Just a Little Farther

As Taylor Wilkerson crossed the George Washington Bridge, he felt prompted to pray for the New York City neighborhood God had called him to. Harlem was the epicenter of a cultural renaissance in the 1920s, but the Great Depression, coupled with deindustrialization, left crime and poverty in its wake.

As Taylor circled Harlem in his car, the Lord kept telling him, Just a little farther. Ninety minutes later Taylor prayed one final prayer as he headed home: Even now, Lord, give me an opportunity to reach someone.

After parking his car Taylor hadn’t taken five steps when he made eye contact with Michael. Taylor asked him a rather bold question: “Do you like your life?” Looking down at the ground, Michael said, “No. I hate my life. I messed it all up.”

When Taylor asked Michael if he knew Jesus, Michael proudly revealed the chain around his neck. “Yeah. I keep Him around my neck.” Taylor gently explained that wearing Jesus around your neck isn’t enough, that you have to invite Him into your heart. Then Taylor asked Michael if he’d ever been to church.

“A few years ago I was in downtown Manhattan,” Michael said, “when an old white dude stopped me and invited me to church. He was dressed all nice in a suit. Later that day I went there, and it turns out he was the pastor! Have you heard of Times Square Church?”

Taylor laughed to himself but kept a poker face. He asked Michael if he remembered the pastor’s name. Michael said, “I gotta think about that. It was…Wilkerson. Yeah, David Wilkerson.” Then Taylor tipped his hand. “Do you want to know my name? My name is Taylor David Wilkerson. Michael, the last person to tell you about Jesus was my great-uncle David Wilkerson. And now Jesus sent me to remind you that it’s not too late to start over.”

When God tells you to go “just a little farther,” a divine appointment might be two inches or two seconds away. If you ignore the prompting, you miss the miracle. If you obey the prompting, you get to go down the rabbit hole. Nothing sets us up for a miracle like going the extra mile—“just a little farther.” That’s when God shows up and shows off. One small step of faith can turn into a giant leap. One chase can change the trajectory of your life or someone else’s eternity.

Taylor shared that story with me over a cup of coffee. He and his wife, Kristen, also shared their heart for Harlem. As they did, I had flashbacks to our first year of church planting in Washington, DC. Planting a church ranks as the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but fear, properly channeled, is scary awesome!

My wife’s family, the Schmidgalls, have been friends with Taylor’s family, the Wilkersons, for many decades. Taylor’s dad, Rich Wilkerson, was like a brother to my father-in-law, Bob Schmidgall. So Taylor and Kristen feel like cousins. They are as nice as nice can be, but make no mistake about it, they are lion chasers! I see a fierce faith within them that is epitomized by one prophetic prayer. Almost like Elisha asking for Elijah’s mantle, Taylor prayed, Lord, if there be any unanswered prayer or unfulfilled dream in David Wilkerson’s life, answer it through me!

Taylor and Kristen’s dream, Trinity Harlem, is really a dream within a dream. It traces back to a near-death experience—a two-inch encounter when David Wilkerson stared death in the face without flinching.

Hold that thought.

Fifty-Year-Old Dreams

A year after the attack on the Twin Towers, I made a trip to New York City with my mentor, Dick Foth, and our friend John Ashcroft. The attorney general had been invited to be a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, and he invited us to be his guests. It was a fun experience, but meeting David Letterman wasn’t the most memorable part of the trip. It was an impromptu meeting with David Wilkerson, the founding pastor of Times Square Church. Like earthquake aftershocks, that ten-minute conversation still reverberates in my spirit.

David Wilkerson’s raw transparency was disarming as he talked about the way Matthew 25 was messing with his mind. He wondered aloud if he would hear God say, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” He questioned whether he’d been “faithful with a few things” or “loved the least of these.” I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

David Wilkerson felt called to the gangs of New York in the 1950s. When they threatened to kill him, he refused to back down. The most famous confrontation is recorded in The Cross and the Switchblade, the New York Times bestseller that has sold more than fifteen million copies.

When Nicky Cruz, the warlord of the Mau Mau street gang, got up in David’s face and threatened to kill him, David said, “You can cut me into a thousand pieces and lay them out in the street, and every piece will still love you.”

David Wilkerson was a lion chaser, to say the least! Yet he wondered aloud whether he had loved the least of these, in the spirit of Matthew 25. As he shared his doubts about living up to the gospel gold standard, I couldn’t help but think, If David Wilkerson doesn’t hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” I’m in big trouble!

I had a flashback to that ten-minute meeting with David when Taylor told me that his driving passion is Matthew 25—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick. He’s fulfilling his great-uncle’s fifty-year-old dream. And there’s one more piece to the dream puzzle. While reading The Cross and the Switchblade, Taylor discovered that David had dreamed of planting a church in Harlem, which he never did. Trinity Harlem isn’t just Taylor’s dream. It’s a fulfillment of a dream that his great-uncle had five decades before.

It’s a dream within a dream.

Premove

One of the most humbling yet rewarding moments in a parent’s life is when “the student becomes the teacher.” I had one of those moments with my son Parker a few years back. He had beaten me in chess quite a few times but never in three moves! He called it the Queen’s Gambit; I called it lucky. But truth be told, Parker had been studying opening moves, forcing moves, quiet moves, and countermoves.

Did you know the total number of possible permutations in just the first ten moves of a chess game is 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000? I’d spell it out, but neither of us has that kind of time!4

That’s a lot of contingencies and possibilities. And the game of life is far more complicated than a game of chess. But that shouldn’t make you nervous, not if the Grand Master is the One ordering your footsteps. After all, it’s in Him that we “live and move and have our being.”5

The key to success is making the right moves, and it’s helpful to think in chess terms. Our move to Washington, DC, was a quiet move, but that one move set the table for the next twenty years. Our first service was an opening move, but it wasn’t any more spectacular than moving a pawn one space. When the DC public school where we met closed down because of fire-code violations, our move to the movie theaters at Union Station was a countermove. And launching our second campus was a forcing move that led to a third, a fourth, and eventually an eighth campus.

As I survey all the possible permutations, it’s a little overwhelming. What if we had done this instead of that? What if we had gone here instead of there? And what if we had done it sooner instead of later? But I see a common thread in our storyline: one move set up the next move, which set up the move after that. In chess it’s called a premove—it’s the move before the move before the move.

We didn’t move to Washington, DC, to plant a church, but God had ulterior motives. We thought we were moving to DC to lead an inner-city ministry, and we were. But God always has reasons beyond reason. The move to DC was a premove. God was setting me up to pastor National Community Church.

Thinking back on all the possible permutations makes me a little dizzy, but I find my equilibrium in God’s sovereignty. Everything in our past is a premove, and God will use it for His glory somehow, someway.

Your birth date and birthplace were no accident. It was the opening move in a life that is destined to serve God’s eternal plans and purposes. God determined exactly when and where you would be born.6 And He’s ordained every zip code thereafter.

I was in the eighth grade when our family started attending Calvary Church, and I didn’t know the pastor had a daughter. And at that point I didn’t care. That isn’t why we went there, but the Matchmaker was setting me up. It was a premove. And when I met Lora, I pulled out my moves! I made opening moves, quiet moves, and counter moves until I checkmated my queen!

Closed Doors

For thirteen years National Community Church met in the movie theaters at Union Station, the transportation hub of Washington, DC that a hundred thousand people passed through every day. That not only put us in the middle of the marketplace, but it also put us on the map. Not many churches have their own Metro stop, train station, and taxi stand that drop people off at their front door!

That golden opportunity started with a phone call informing me that the DC public school where we met was closing its doors because of fire-code violations. My immediate reaction was fear, because it put us on the verge of becoming a homeless church. But I soon discovered that some of God’s best premoves are closed doors.

I would not have walked into the movie theaters at Union Station if God hadn’t closed that door. And it’s no coincidence that I walked in the day after that theater chain rolled out a nationwide VIP program to recruit use of their theaters during nonmovie hours. It was as if God rolled out the red carpet, but the reality is, He had made premoves a century before.

After signing the lease with the movie theaters at Union Station, I picked up Union Station: A History of Washington’s Grand Terminal. On February 28, 1903, Teddy Roosevelt signed “a bill of Congress to create a Union Station and for other purposes.” That little phrase jumped off the page and into my spirit, infusing me with a sense of destiny.

Nearly a hundred years after that bill was passed, Union Station started serving God’s purposes through the ministry of National Community Church. Roosevelt thought he was building a train station, but he was also building a church—and Congress funded our capital campaign!

Looking back, I laugh at the fact that I was so scared when the school we were meeting at closed. I even have the journal entry where I wrote that we had been “backed into a corner.” It felt as if we had fallen into a pit with a lion on a snowy day. I couldn’t see a way out, a way forward. And the same thing happened thirteen years later when I got a phone call informing me that the movie theaters at Union Station were shutting down. At first I was scared, just as I had been when the school shut down. How do you relocate a congregation that has grown into the thousands? And we had to do it in one week’s time!

One of the most circled promises in my Bible is Revelation 3:7: “What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.” I love the first half of that promise—open doors. The second half? Not so much! But some of the greatest miracles in my life have been on the other side of a closed door. It was the closed door at Union Station that led to our future campus—the $29.3 million Castle on Capitol Hill. So praise God for both!

Someday you may thank God for the closed doors even more than the open doors! It’s one of His best premoves.

One Article

Albert Schweitzer was a twentieth-century renaissance man—doctor, philosopher, and organist extraordinaire. He signed with Columbia Records and produced twenty-five recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach. But it was his work as a medical missionary that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. That entrepreneurial enterprise began in the spring of 1913 when Albert and his wife, Helene, traveled fourteen days by raft up the Ogooué River, through the Central African rainforest, to reach a mission outpost in Gabon. There they established a hospital and cared for tens of thousands of patients over four decades and through two world wars. A hundred years later Albert Schweitzer Hospital is one of the leading research hospitals on the continent of Africa and is working to end the scourge of malaria.7

Now here’s the rest of the story.

One autumn day in 1904 Albert sat down at his writing desk at St. Thomas Seminary and found a magazine from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. It was put there by Miss Scherdlin, a childhood friend of Albert’s. She knew that he loved those missionary letters. In fact, when he was a child, his father used to read them to him. Before turning to his studies, Albert turned the pages of that magazine until he came to an article titled “The Needs of the Congo Mission.” That article changed the trajectory of his life. The author, Alfred Boegner, expressed hope that his appeal for missionaries would fall into the hands of those “on whom the Master’s eyes already rested.”

Albert Schweitzer had locked eyes with his lion. “I finished my article,” Schweitzer said, “and quietly began my work. My search was over.”8

It was a quiet move, a premove.

I don’t belong in the same sentence as Schweitzer, but my dream journey parallels his in one significant way. Like Schweitzer, I discovered my destiny in a magazine. On the heels of our failed church plant during my seminary days, I was flipping through a mission magazine when I came across an advertisement for a parachurch ministry in Washington, DC. Why I stopped flipping the pages is still a mystery to me, but there was something magnetic about that particular page. That article led to a phone call, which led to a visit, which led to an opening move to Washington, DC.

Destiny doesn’t make appointments. It usually shows up at the door unannounced. And it often knocks quietly, so you have to listen carefully. It shows up in a magazine, in a meeting, in a lecture. It shows up on vacation or on a mission trip.

In a sense, you don’t discover your destiny. Your destiny discovers you. It shows up in a field of lentils, in taunting Philistines, in a pit with a lion on a snowy day.

I don’t know what Benaiah had on his to-do list that day, but I’m sure he had places to go and things to do. But Benaiah recognized his destiny when it roared. Instead of taking flight, he decided to fight for his destiny.

The Learning Curve

The genesis moment of Albert Schweitzer’s dream was the autumn day in 1904 when he picked up a magazine from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. But let me reverse-engineer his dream journey a little further. It was a summer morning in 1896 when Albert made a resolution.

“While outside the birds sang…I came to the conclusion that until I was thirty I could consider myself justified in devoting myself to scholarship and the arts,” Schweitzer said, “but after that I would devote myself directly to serving humanity.”9

I like Schweitzer’s approach to the third decade of life: learn as much as you can about as much as you can. I’ve shared that philosophy with our congregation, which is 50 percent single twenty-somethings. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to climb the corporate ladder. For most people their first job is not their dream job, and neither is their second or third or fourth. But that’s part of the process of discovering our destiny. It’s those odd jobs and unenjoyable jobs that help us identify our dream job once we find it.

Instead of climbing the corporate ladder, focus on the learning curve.

That’s what Nicole Poindexter did when she was between jobs. Instead of fixating on the fact that she was jobless, she decided to make the most of it. One of her New Year’s resolutions was reading the Bible cover to cover, but Nicole had so much time on her hands and so much hunger in her heart that she finished by the end of January!

Nicole connected with the promises of God in a way she never had before. And it seemed like every move she made was ordained by God. In Nicole’s words, “Nothing that happened in that month was coincidence.”

During her self-made sabbatical, Nicole started researching solar-powered electricity as a potential business on the continent of Africa. One month later she was on a plane to Ghana.

On the last day of my trip, it was Ghanaian Independence Day, and I was asked to stop in at a prayer service for the country. As I watched the room full of people praying, I realized that it was easy to make this dream about me and my success, but I knew that God had brought me to Ghana to be a blessing to them.

The first verses Nicole memorized after putting her faith in Christ was the promise given to Abraham in Genesis 12:1–2: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you….I will bless you…and you will be a blessing.”

That verse is Nicole’s script, and she is living it out literally—leaving her country and going to the country that God has shown her. In 2015, 125 Africans in the village of Affulkrom got electricity for the first time in their lives, thanks to Nicole’s dream. Four months and four villages later, the total was up to 750 people. As Nicole likes to say, “The score is now Light 750, Darkness 0.” That solar-powered electricity is a lifeline, enabling everything from communication to health care.

If you don’t have a dream, keep learning while you’re waiting.

Get into God’s Word, and God’s dream will get into you.

Dream Year

A few years into our church plant, I met a fellow church planter in the DC area named Ben Arment. We struck up a friendship, which is easy for church planters because it can be a lonely journey.

At the time, I was a conference junkie. I was always looking for ideas that our staff could beg, borrow, or steal, and we got lots of them at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The first year we attended, only two of us went, but that conference became an annual pilgrimage for our staff. It was part of our learning curve. The last time we made the trip, more than fifty staff members attended. In all those years, only once did we take someone who was not a staff member. That person was Ben Arment, and I felt prompted to pay his way.

“That one trip changed my life,” Ben said. “All my dreams and desires found resonance at that event.” What I didn’t know at the time is that Ben had taken a small step of faith by incorporating an organization that would produce conferences much like Catalyst.

The Catalyst Conference is a big event—thirteen-thousand people pack the Gwinnett Center every year. But for Ben it was a two-inch event. It took courage for Ben to quit pastoring. But he realized that he was “wired to launch things, not to pastor people.”

The dream of creating conferences didn’t happen overnight. In fact, Ben renewed the annual fee on his dream ten times before he finally gave birth to his brainchild, the STORY conference. Sometimes that’s how long it takes for our expertise and our experiences to catch up with our dreams!

I miss more opportunities than I seize, trust me, but I knew that Ben needed to go to that conference with us. I thought it would help him fulfill his calling as a pastor, but God had a surprise up His sovereign sleeve. Catalyst became the catalyst for Ben to quit pastoring and start pursuing other God-given, God-ordained dreams.

Over the past decade Ben has helped countless people pursue their dreams through the STORY conference and his coaching network, Dream Year.10 And in keeping with the way he’s wired, Ben has since sold those ventures to chase even bigger lions!

“Once a lion chaser,” Ben says, “always a lion chaser!”