ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2015, the dead body of a three-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi washed ashore near the port city of Bodrum, Turkey. He had been fleeing from the Islamic State with his refugee family, seeking sanctuary in Europe. A Turkish journalist, Nilüfer Demir, snapped photos of Aylan’s lifeless body lying in the wet sand and of a refugee worker carrying his limp little body.
Those images offended the public consciousness and drew attention to the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Nations took notice, prayer vigils were held, and donations to refugee-related charities surged. “It was one of those moments,” noted the BBC, “when the whole world seems to care.”1
We have a choice in moments like this: go back to business as usual or be about the Father’s business. Which is it? Because it’s either one or the other.
Syria has a population of twenty-three million people, and nearly half of them are displaced and in desperate need of humanitarian help. Half of that half are innocent children, like Aylan.
An old adage says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” But I think it’s worth more than that. The brain processes print on a page at one hundred bits per second, while it processes pictures at one billion bits per second. So technically, a picture is really worth ten million words!2
“Photojournalists sometimes capture images so powerful,” said Nick Logan of Global News, “the public and policymakers can’t ignore what the pictures show.”3 One picture has the power to prick the conscience. It can start a riot or start a revolution.
Famed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called it “the decisive moment.” He not only coined the phrase, but he also wrote a best-selling book by that title. “To me,” he said, “photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” If you are a split second early or a split second late, you miss the moment. And it’s not to be left to luck. To Cartier-Breeson, it was a learned skill requiring an eye for the occasion. “You must know with intuition when to click the camera,” he said. “Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” But if you capture it? “A photograph [can] fix eternity in an instant.”4
If the Bible were a picture book, 2 Samuel 23 would have more than its fair share of decisive moments. I can picture Josheb-Basshebeth raising his spear with eight hundred enemy soldiers in the blurred background. I can picture the look on Benaiah’s face as he locks eyes with the lion. But let me zoom in on Eleazar’s hand, the hand that froze to his sword when he took his stand against the Philistines.
Eyes squint in the midday sun.
Jaw muscles clench tight.
Veins in his sword arm pulsate.
It’s Clint Eastwood in Sudden Impact: “Go ahead, make my day!”
It’s John Wayne in True Grit: “Young fella, if you’re looking for trouble, I’ll accommodate you.”
It’s Russell Crowe in Gladiator: “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.”
I don’t want to put words in Eleazar’s mouth, and his actions speak louder than words anyway. But if I’m the scriptwriter, this is the moment for Eleazar’s epic one-liner. And I’m guessing he said something like this: “I may die on this battlefield today, but I won’t die with a sword in my back!”
The word retreat wasn’t in Eleazar’s vocabulary. Neither was defeat. It wasn’t fight or flight. It was fight for your life, fight to the death!
I recently spoke at a pastor’s conference in Harrogate, England.5 Speaking right after Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby was awfully humbling. But not as humbling as speaking before Brother Edward, who pastors a church in Damascus, the capital of Syria. A few weeks before the conference, 157 people were killed in a bombing not far from where he pastors. His life is in danger every day. His congregants walk down sniper alleys just to worship together.
There goes any excuse we have!
The moderator of the conference asked Brother Edward why he doesn’t leave Syria. “When one country pulls its ambassadors out of another country, you know it’s bad,” said Brother Edward. “God is not calling His ambassadors out of Syria.”
Like Eleazar before him, Brother Edward holds his ground.
A Hundred Generations
Every life is defined by decisive moments, and those moments of decision often dictate the course of decades. That shouldn’t make you nervous, not if God is ordering your footsteps. It should fill you with a sense of destiny!
In his book Decisive Moments in History, author Stefan Zweig described “a single moment that determines and decides everything: a single Yes, a single No, a too early or a too late makes that hour irrevocable for a hundred generations and determines the life of an individual, a people, and even the destiny of all mankind.”6
That may sound like an overstatement at first, but I actually think it’s an understatement. Yes, decisive moments are few and far between. But the ripple effects of those moments transcend time and space. Our actions and inactions have eternal ramifications. And for the record, inaction is an action.
When we fail to take action, we forfeit the future. And just as inaction is an action, indecision is a decision. As Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”7 It’s true of the refugee crisis and every other crisis our world faces. It’s our job as lion chasers to step up, to step in. Do we need immigration laws and asylum policies? Absolutely. But we also need to fulfill our diplomatic duty as ambassadors of heaven.
NCC recently sent a team to work with our friends at the A21 Campaign who are providing relief, with lots of love, in refugee camps outside Thessaloniki, Greece. My wife, Lora, spent several days in one of those camps, and the pictures she took of those precious children, children like Aylan, were heartbreaking. With each picture I prayed, God, help us help them!
Sometimes it feels as if hope has been lost, but don’t forget that history is broken in half by the birth of Christ. Quit living as though it’s BC—before Christ. It’s AD—anno domini, the year of the Lord. If you need to, reread the book of Revelation to remind yourself that love wins and hate loses; faith wins and fear loses!
We fight darkness with light, fear with faith, and hate with hope. And when we do, the gates of hell cannot prevail against us. In the words of Julia Ward Howe and her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on!”8
His truth is unstoppable!
His grace is unconquerable!
But we must step up, step in.
Silver Spoon
Elizabeth Fry was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, yet she refused to turn a blind eye to the Dickensian poverty of nineteenth-century London. A contemporary of William Wilberforce, who led the campaign to abolish slavery in Great Britain, Elizabeth Fry had two great objectives. The first was prison reform, and the second was homelessness. And both were five-hundred-pound lions!
One day a family friend, Stephen Grellet, invited Elizabeth to visit Newgate Prison. The conditions she encountered in the women’s ward horrified her. Elizabeth had eleven children of her own to care for, but that didn’t keep her from caring for those prisoners. She returned the next day with food and clothes. Then she started a prison school for the children of those female prisoners. And eventually she founded the British Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners, the first nationwide women’s organization in England. Fry’s strategy for raising awareness was inviting prominent members of society to spend a night in prison—in a pit—so they could experience the conditions for themselves.9
In the winter of 1819, Elizabeth stumbled upon the body of a young boy who had frozen to death.10 Much like the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, it was an image she would never forget. Elizabeth established a nightly shelter to care for the homeless of London, a model that was replicated all across Great Britain.
A great dream doesn’t just make a difference. It inspires dreams to the third and fourth generation. And that may be Elizabeth’s greatest legacy. In 1840 at the age of sixty, Elizabeth started a training school for nurses. It was that program that inspired Florence Nightingale, the mother of modern nursing, to step up and step in during the Crimean War. Like doctors who swear to uphold the Hippocratic Oath, nurses vow the Nightingale Pledge.11 They may not know the full backstory, since the pledge was instituted in 1893, but their vow is a dream within a dream.
Since 2001 Elizabeth Fry has been pictured on the Bank of England’s five-pound note. That’s a high honor. It’s a testimony to a woman who simply refused to remain silent, who refused to do nothing.
Don’t let what you cannot do keep you from doing what you can.
Don’t give up before you give it a try.
Hold your ground or hold your peace? Which is it?
Contextual Intelligence
In the book In Their Time, Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria profile some of the greatest business leaders of the twentieth century. Those leaders lived in different eras, worked in different industries, and faced different challenges, but the authors found one common denominator among them—contextual intelligence. It’s the differentiating factor between success and failure in for-profit and nonprofit dreams. Great leaders possess acute sensitivity to the social, political, technological, and demographic contexts that define their eras.
It was true of Steve Jobs, who had a vision for an all-in-one computer in every home. It was true of Elizabeth Fry, who fought for social reform in nineteenth-century England. And it was true of David’s mighty men, who led a political revolt in the tenth century BC.
Let me put contextual intelligence into biblical context:
From the tribe of Issachar, there were 200 leaders of the tribe with their relatives. All these men understood the signs of the times and knew the best course for Israel to take.12
For the record, the other tribes are referred to as warriors or soldiers. Only those from the tribe of Issachar are called leaders.13 Why? Because of their contextual intelligence. They didn’t just have a pulse on the social, political, and spiritual temper of the times. They were innovators and entrepreneurs who knew how to turn their ideas into strategies.
Contextual intelligence is the ability to spot opportunity where others don’t. That’s what sets leaders apart; that’s what sets them up for success. Call it a sixth sense. Call it gut instinct. Lion chasers see and seize the decisive moment.
In 1893 a $10,000 Congressional appropriation established Rural Free Delivery. Until then Americans living in rural areas rode their horses into town to pick up their mail at the general store. RFD provided mail service to rural residents for the first time. Two enterprising businessmen, Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears, saw a new distribution channel for their products. They produced so many catalogs that they became the second most widely read books in the country after the Bible.14
That’s contextual intelligence.
Two thousand years ago Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations.”15 He gave us a green light, but He didn’t tell us how to go. For the better part of twenty centuries, it was on foot, on horseback, or by ship. Now we go by plane, train, and automobile. We can even “go” at the speed of light, circumnavigating the globe six times per second with a digital gospel.
The game has changed, but the rules haven’t. There are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. We shouldn’t just be trend spotters. With the Holy Spirit’s help, we should be trendsetters. If you want to reach people no one is reaching, you might have to do something no one else is doing. To be clear, the gospel doesn’t require gimmicks. In the same breath, irrelevance is irreverence. Innovation is a form of incarnation. And anything less is laziness!
What does that have to do with Eleazar?
What I see in Eleazar is a man who understood the times. He not only saw an opportunity, but he seized it. He didn’t shrink in fear. He stepped up, stepped in. And most important, he knew what battlefield he was willing to die on.
As a dreamer, you have to choose your battles wisely. There are lots of kingdom causes that I care deeply about, but I can’t devote my time, talent, and treasure to all of them. I can’t be on the front lines of every fight. Sometimes I cheer others on from the sidelines with my giving, my praying. But like Eleazar, you need to identify the battlefield you’re willing to die on. Then you need to fight the good fight until your hand freezes to the sword.
Kodak Moment
For nearly a hundred years, the Eastman Kodak company dominated the film industry. Not only did it control 85 percent of camera sales, but it was ranked one of the five most valuable brands in America.16
In 1996 Kodak had 140,000 employees and a valuation of $28 billion. A decade later they stopped turning a profit. And in 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy.17
The question is, what happened?
In 1975 a small team of talented technicians at Kodak built the first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, weighed 8.5 pounds, and had a resolution of .01 megapixels.18 It also took twenty-three seconds to snap the picture! Makes you appreciate your camera phone, doesn’t it? Kodak was on the cutting edge of technology, but they didn’t jump the curve. Instead of embracing the new technology, they decided to do it the way it had always been done. In other words, they missed the decisive moment while they were in the darkroom. Or you could even say they missed the Kodak moment.
In his brilliant book The Anointing, R. T. Kendall talks about the danger of becoming what he calls yesterday’s man. People who had a tremendous anointing on their lives yesterday can live off the momentum of that anointing for a while. Some people even think the anointing is still on them, but it’s the momentum of yesterday’s anointing.19
I read a one-liner on page 133 of his book that packed a punch. It influenced me the way page 23 in Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire influenced Steven Furtick. “Sometimes the greatest opposition to what God wants to do next,” said R. T. Kendall, “comes from those who were on the cutting edge of what God did last.”20
I need God’s anointing today more than I did yesterday. And I’ll need it even more tomorrow than I do today! Without it, I’m below average, and I’ll eventually become yesterday’s man. With it, the law of averages is out the window! We don’t just let the future happen; we make it happen with God’s help.
What got you here might not get you where you need to go next. At critical junctures you have to jump the curve. You have to reinvent yourself, reimagine your life. That’s what dreamers do.
This past year I took my first true sabbatical in twenty years, a three-month hiatus to rest and read and recreate. Just prior to my last sermon before sabbatical, our staff surprised me with a thank-you video that made my eyes sweat. After watching it with me, my youngest son, Josiah, said, “Dad, you better be inspirational.”
No pressure!
Truth be told, I embrace the pressure that puts on me. In fact, I think it’s healthy and holy. Excellence honors God, so we need to get better and better at whatever we’re called to do. And it happens little by little, day by day. That positive stress, eustress, forces me to seek a fresh anointing each and every day. Without it, I’m coasting. With it, I’m gaining momentum.
Inertia
One final thought from Henri Cartier-Bresson: “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.”21 That’s true of companies, like Kodak. And it’s true of people, like Eleazar, like you.
Let me share one more decisive moment, because it might help you identify yours.
A 1999 poll by the British journal Physics World ranked Richard Feynman as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.22 Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize for physics, Feynman popularized his passion for quantum physics via lectures, books, and his famous Feynman diagrams.
Before he was even born, his father prophetically stated, “If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist.” When Richard was a baby, his father would set up tiles like dominoes, and baby Richard would push them over. It was his first lesson in physics. When Richard was a small boy, his father would set him on his lap and read to him from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The greatest gift Richard Feynman’s father bequeathed to him was the ability to notice things. One day Richard was pulling a little wagon when he became intrigued with the way a ball in the wagon would roll. When he pulled the wagon, the ball rolled to the back. When he stopped, the ball rolled to the front. When he asked why, his father said, “That, nobody knows.”
It was Richard’s dad daring him to figure out why.
He then explained, “Things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called inertia.”
It was a decisive moment for Richard Feynman.
Looking back on that boyhood memory, Feynman said, “It has motivated me for the rest of my life.”23 In a sense, Feynman’s entire career was an attempt to answer that genesis question. And it’s that kind of laser-like focus that is absolutely necessary when chasing a five-hundred-pound lion. One misstep can end a dream journey. That doesn’t mean you operate in a spirit of fear. It does mean you operate in a spirit of focus!
Every step needs to be carefully measured at critical junctures. Like a good carpenter, you need to measure twice and cut once. If you measure only once, you’ll probably have to cut twice! Of course, if you’re afraid of making a mistake, you’ll probably miss the opportunity. So it’s a balancing act.
There are opportunities all around you all the time—opportunities to show kindness, opportunities to show courage. And just like the photographer who is ready to click and capture the moment, you have to be ready to seize the opportunity.
Gut Instincts
One of the most impressive feats in professional sports is hitting a baseball that is 2.86 inches in diameter and traveling 60.5 feet in .43 seconds.24 It takes one-fifth of a second for the retina to receive incoming messages, and by then the ball is halfway to home plate!25 The margin of error between hitting and missing the ball is only five milliseconds.
What’s true of baseball players is also true of sword fighters. Peripheral vision and reaction time are critical! But instead of three strikes and you’re out, it is one miss and you’re dead.
Even the best baseball hitters don’t really see the pitch. They have to swing long before they know when or where the ball will be. They aren’t seeing it as much as they are seeing into the future. They are guessing, based on visual clues, when and where the pitch will cross the plate.
It reminds me of the famous quip by hockey great Wayne Gretzky. His secret to success? “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”26 And what’s true in hockey is also true in chess.
In a 1940s study of chess players, Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot tried to discern what differentiated chess masters from grand masters. One difference he discovered was their ability to anticipate moves. Grand masters had a better understanding of the game situation in five seconds than club players had in fifteen minutes.27
What does that have to do with Eleazar?
And what does that have to do with you?
Over time we cultivate a sixth sense that enables us to operate out of instinct. Whether you play professional football or the stock market, experience leads to instincts. And those gut instincts can make or break you. At times you have to ignore your instincts. But more often than not, you need to obey your gut instincts. And that takes good old-fashioned guts.
If Eleazar had calculated the odds, doing a thorough cost-benefit analysis, he probably would have run away with the rest of the retreaters. But Eleazar had a few battles under his belt. He not only trusted his training. He trusted his gut instincts, and they were gutsy!
I could have told you a dozen different stories about decisive moments, but I chose Richard Feynman’s story because it revolves around the idea of inertia. Inertia is the resistance of a physical object to a change in its state of motion. And that’s especially true of physical objects called human beings.
When it comes to chasing lions, inertia is enemy number one. Our natural tendency is to think the way we’ve always thought and do things the way we’ve always done them. It’s hard to break old habits and hard to build new habits. But if you want God to do something new, you can’t keep doing the same old thing.
What do you need to stop doing today?
What do you need to start doing today?
Whether it’s a stop-doing list or a start-doing list, a dream without a to-do list is called a wish list. Don’t get overwhelmed by the size of the lion. Focus on the first step.
If you don’t do it, you’ll become yesterday’s man.
But if you do it, you’ll become tomorrow’s man, tomorrow’s woman.