THE SKYLINE OF NEW YORK CITY is awe inspiring, to say the least. But what fascinates me even more is the city beneath the city. The city’s nine thousand manhole covers service a ninety-eight-thousand-mile labyrinth of utility cables. A six-thousand-mile maze of sewers circulates 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater every day. And there’s 722 miles of subway tracks that would stretch all the way to Chicago if laid end to end.
So there’s the skyline with its skyscrapers. There’s the city beneath the city with its subway. And beneath the city beneath the city there is Manhattan schist, the bedrock that much of New York City is built upon. Like every modern city, the aboveground cityscape mirrors the subterranean topography in more ways than meet the eye.
In 1865 a civil engineer named Egbert Viele published a topographical map that is still used by geotechnical engineers 150 years later. Viele mapped the location of streams, marshes, and coastlines, superimposing them over the street grid. When the sixty-story Chase Manhattan Plaza was built in 1957, the chief engineer failed to reference the Viele Map. If he had, he would have realized that he was building right over a subterranean stream that created quicksand.1
Now here’s my point.
The brick-and-mortar buildings of New York City stand where there used to be rocks and streams and meadows and forests. If you could reverse the time lapse of the last two hundred years, the concrete jungle would turn back into Central Park. The animals in the Central Park Zoo would still be there, but without the cages.
Just as every person has a genealogy, so does every place.
Four hundred years ago New York City was New Amsterdam. Its fifteen hundred residents spoke eighteen different languages, because it was a trading outpost for the Dutch West India Company. That layered history makes a place what it is.
What’s true of New York City is true of Washington, DC.
It takes a little imagination to picture it in your mind’s eye, but the hill where the United States Capitol now stands used to be the epicenter of the Algonquian empire. Instead of museums and street lamps, imagine wigwams and campfires. At the foot of what is now Capitol Hill, there was a council house where all the Algonquian-speaking tribes gathered for important meetings.2
It wasn’t until the latter half of the seventeenth century that white immigrants settled in the area. On June 5, 1663, a farmer named Francis Pope acquired a four-hundred-acre tract of land that included Jenkins Hill, the hill where the Algonquians had held council. Pope named it Rome. Some thought it was a playful pun, given his last name, but Pope believed it was prophetic. He had a dream that one day a splendid parliament house would be built on the hill now known as Capitol Hill.3 It was the middle of nowhere two hundred years ago, but Pope was spot on. His pastureland is now the epicenter of the political world.
I once saw a sign that sarcastically said, “On this site in 1897, nothing happened.” That’s funny! But in reality every geography has a genealogy. Of course, some sites are more storied than others, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
A thousand years before the birth of Christ, it was the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. And a thousand years before that, it was the site on Mount Moriah where God provided a ram in the thicket for Father Abraham.4 Those events are separated by thousands of years, but they are connected by geography and theology. At the very place where God provided a ram to take Isaac’s place, God would provide the Lamb of God to take our place. One event foreshadowed the other by thousands of years.
Just as certain places have incredible historical significance, certain places have incredible personal significance. The cow pasture in Alexandria, Minnesota, where I felt called to ministry is my burning bush. To anyone else it’s an ordinary pasture. To me, it’s holy ground. For me, it’s like the cleft in the rock where Elijah saw God pass by and heard the whisper of God.
That’s what the cave of Adullam was for David. It was a dark place, a difficult time. But that’s where trust was tempered, where faith was forged. That’s where David discovered what it meant to give God the sacrifice of praise.
The cave of Adullam was a thin place—a place where God met David and where David met God in a whole new way. Tough times will do that. The cave of Adullam wasn’t where David wanted to be, but it’s where David needed to be for a season. It’s there that we discover that the dream isn’t about us at all.
The dream is from God.
The dream is for God.
Zoom
On road trips I often pass the time by listening to podcasts. A recent favorite is Serial, hosted by Sarah Koenig. The second season of Serial details the story of Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, who goes AWOL from his army base in eastern Afghanistan.
It’s a military mystery, which I won’t try to unravel. I bring it up only because I love the organizing metaphor that Sarah Koenig uses to thread the storyline. She likens it to Zoom, a book she used to read to her children.
Zoom has no words, just pictures. On the first page there is a pointy red shape, but you aren’t sure what it is until the next page when you realize it’s a rooster’s comb. Each page zooms out a little farther. The rooster is standing on a fence with two children watching him. Then you see a farmhouse and farm animals, and then you realize that they aren’t real. They’re actually toys being played with by a child. But wait, the next page reveals that all of it is a scene from an advertisement in a magazine. The magazine is on the lap of someone napping on a deck chair, which is on a cruise ship. With each turn of the page, the aperture gets wider and wider until the original image—a pointy red shape on the rooster’s comb—is so far away that it becomes invisible to the naked eye.
“That’s what the story of Bowe Bergdahl is like,” said Sarah Koenig. “This one idiosyncratic guy makes a radical decision at the age of twenty-three to walk away into Afghanistan, and the consequences of that decision, they spin out wider and wider.”5
That’s true of everyone, of every decision we make. Every decision and every indecision has a ripple effect way beyond our ability to predict. Every cause has an effect, and the effect has a cumulative effect. It also has a hundred unintended consequences that set off a thousand chain reactions.
With that as a backdrop, let me zoom in on the cave of Adullam.
The Proving Ground
It sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it? The cave of Adullam. Sort of like Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. But this was not a five-star resort; it was a last resort. The only reason anyone would ever go there is that there isn’t anywhere else to go. This is the last place on earth David wanted to be, but sometimes that is when God has you right where He wants you.
I had a twenty-five-year plan for our church plant in Chicago, but that church plant never got off the ground. I thought the dream was over, but Chicago wasn’t the final destination; it was a layover. I had the right idea in the wrong place. That failed church plant was God’s way of rerouting us to Washington, DC.
The hardest part of any dream journey is the holding pattern.
It’s the twenty-five years between God’s promise to Abraham and the birth of Isaac. It’s the thirteen years between Joseph’s dream and his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream. It’s the forty years between Moses’s dream of delivering Israel and the Exodus.
Almost every dream I’ve had has gone through some sort of holding pattern, and it can feel like a holding cell. I felt called to write when I was twenty-two, but my first book didn’t get published until I turned thirty-five. Thirteen years felt like forever, and I got frustrated. But I leveraged that holding pattern by reading thousands of books while my dream sat on the tarmac.
It took five years of circling a crackhouse in prayer before we finally got a contract on our piece of the promised land. Then it took another five years to rezone 201 F Street NE and build Ebenezers coffeehouse. In the past decade we’ve served more than a million customers and given more than $1 million in net profits to missions. We’ve even been voted the number one coffeehouse in DC a time or two. But it took a decade just to get to ground zero.
If you dare to dream big, you better think long.
The day that David was anointed by the prophet Samuel was a day unlike any other, one of the most memorable days of his life. But David didn’t become king the next day. David was likely anointed while he was still a teenager, but he didn’t become king until the age of thirty. It was a fifteen-year ellipsis that had to feel like forever. But even when David thought the plan wasn’t working, God was working His plan.
The cave of Adullam was his proving ground.
Remember when Saul wandered into a cave where David was hiding, and David had him dead to rights? He could have killed Saul and called it self-defense. But David did not dare touch the Lord’s anointed. David’s band of brothers were ticked off at first, but after the anger wore off, I bet their respect went up a notch or two.
That moment was a microcosm. David forfeited what seemed like a golden opportunity to preserve his integrity. Why? Because an opportunity isn’t an opportunity if you have to compromise your integrity. It’s the decisions when no one is looking that will dictate your destiny. In fact, your integrity is your destiny!
Killing Goliath was an epic act of bravery.
Not killing Saul was an epic act of integrity.
You know how you get a testimony? By passing a test. No test, no testimony. So count your blessings when you find yourself in the cave of Adullam. The holding pattern is an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to trust, an opportunity to prove your integrity.
Are you in a holding pattern? Make the most of it. Life is lived in seasons, and each season presents unique challenges, unique opportunities.
When I tell people that I used to read more than two hundred books a year in the early years of NCC, some have a hard time believing it. Then I remind them that I pastored a church of twenty-five people. I had time on my hands! I was incredibly frustrated with our growth, or lack thereof. But I made the most of that holding pattern. I now wish I had the time to read like that, but I don’t.
Wherever you are, there you are!
Be fruitful right where you’re planted.
Genius
The Latin word genius had a different connotation in Roman times than it does now. We have individualized the concept and given the label to musical geniuses, fashion geniuses, culinary geniuses. In ancient times it referred to a presiding deity that followed people everywhere they went, like a guardian angel. And there was a second dimension. Not only did every person have his or her own unique genius, but so did every place.
“Cities, towns, and marketplaces, all possessed their own presiding spirit, a genius loci, that continuously animated them,” said Eric Weiner in The Geography of Genius.6 Think Disney, the happiest place on earth; or Silicon Valley, the seedbed of startups; or Nashville, the magnet for country music.
During one of my first classes as a freshman at the University of Chicago, my professor mentioned that we were just a few feet from where Enrico Fermi created the world’s first nuclear reactor. I got goose bumps and then hoped it wasn’t radiation! The University of Chicago has produced an astounding eighty-nine Nobel Laureates. I never bumped into any of them on campus, but I could feel their presence. There was a genius loci at the U of C, and it’s true of every school, every business, every organization.
If you look at Scripture through this filter, it provides an interesting perspective. There are places known for sinfulness, like Sodom and Gomorrah. There are places that seem to be cursed, like Chorazin and Bethsaida. Then there are places where God seems to show up and show off, like Mount Carmel or Mount Sinai.
What does any of that have to do with David?
David’s résumé as a warrior-king was impressive. Lots of battles won, lots of kingdoms conquered. But his most enduring legacy may be as a singer-songwriter. His artistic range was impressive, from indie rock to country to R&B. But my favorite album may be David singing the blues. Let’s label it The Cave Sessions.
The Cave Sessions
There are three tracks recorded in the cave: Psalms 34, 57, and 142. They have a unique vibe, probably because David wrote them during one of the most difficult seasons of his life. That’s what makes them so real, so raw. The cave psalms are similar to the prison epistles Paul wrote. The context makes the lyrics so much more powerful. And that’s how David made it through this season of his life, by giving God the sacrifice of praise.
We read the psalms through our individualized, westernized point of view, but I bet David’s band of brothers sang backup. When David sang, “Glorify the LORD with me; let us exalt his name together,”7 it was David’s mighty men who sang harmony.
An old adage says, “Misery loves company.” It can be interpreted negatively, but I think it reveals something about our human nature. We can bear just about anything if we don’t have to bear it alone.
Like Jonathan, we need an armorbearer to climb the cliff with us.
Like Moses, we need Aaron and Hur to hold up our arms.
Like David, we need mighty men to fight with us and for us.
When you look back on your life as a whole, you’ll certainly celebrate the successes. But you’ll also take pride in enduring difficult days, overcoming daunting challenges. We dream of winning the crown, like David. But we’ll be defined by how we endured disappointment, faced our fears, and learned from our mistakes.
A few years ago I learned a valuable lesson from a two-star general who played a mean guitar on one of our NCC worship teams. He complimented us on how good we were at sharing wins. That’s a best practice at NCC. We celebrate what God is doing at the beginning of every staff meeting, and that positivity sets the tone for everything we do.
“You let us share in the miracle,” said the general. “But you don’t let us share in the struggle.” That was a game changer in the way I lead, in the way I preach. When you let people share in the struggle, they have skin in the game. That’s how you become a band of brothers, a band of sisters. That’s what happened at the cave of Adullam.
The Dream Center
I have a century-old picture of four men in top hats standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, east of the Anacostia River. What is perhaps the grandest of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s grand avenues was nothing more than a dirt road surrounded by cow pastures. There are only two buildings in the picture. One is a stone firehouse built in 1892. The other is the home of Arthur E. Randle, one of the men pictured, who served as president of the United States Realty Company.
Over the past century the city has grown up around 2909 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. Often referred to as “the forgotten quadrant” of our city, Randle’s home sits as a beacon of hope in one of the most crime-ridden, poverty-stricken parts of our city. Two decades ago it was dubbed the Southeast White House because its architecture resembles that of the White House, plus it sits on Pennsylvania Avenue. A house on the hill for all people, the Southeast White House is a place where children from Randle Highlands School are mentored, a place where reconciliation lunches bridge the racial divide, a place where hospitality happens in the name of Jesus.
That’s the short story, but let me share the struggle.
Remember the Convoy of Hope that we hosted at RFK Stadium? It was a banner day for NCC as we pulled off an outreach that touched ten thousand people. After the outreach we were patting ourselves on the back. That’s when we felt as if the Holy Spirit said, Now I want you to do this every day.
Every day? It took a year of planning to pull off that one day. It also took eighty-five churches and nonprofits. The thought of doing something like that every day seemed impossible, but we started dreaming about a Dream Center.
For five years we looked for a footprint, a place where we could have a presence in one of the most underprivileged, underresourced parts of our city. Every avenue we pursued proved to be a dead end. What we didn’t know was that the answer was right under our nose.
The Southeast White House started the same year we started pastoring NCC—1996. And over the years we had cultivated a friendship, a partnership. We knew we didn’t need a building to make a difference, so we started recruiting NCCers to serve as mentors at the Southeast White House. Then we started hosting the reconciliation lunch. Then we purchased the abandoned apartment building next to the Southeast White House, which was transformed into our DC Dream Center this year.
I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s taken about a decade to get to ground zero. But when your dream has eternal objectives, it gives you the patience to think long. We want to do things that make a difference a hundred years from now, so a decade is a drop in the bucket.
By definition a God-sized dream is bigger than you are. You don’t have the time, talent, or treasure to pull it off. Without divine intervention it’s destined to fail. But here’s what I’ve found: if you keep growing, what is impossible today can be accomplished in a year or two or ten. Of course, it will probably involve some cave sessions along the way!
In our first year as a church, our total income was less than $50,000. Fast-forward twenty years. Our giving on the last day of last year was five times that. In other words, God provided five times as much in one day as He did in one year twenty years ago! That’s how faith and faithfulness work.
When God does a miracle, you believe Him for bigger and better miracles the next time. That’s how you steward miracles—you up the ante. You keep leapfrogging by faith until one day you look back and can hardly believe how far you’ve come with God’s help. That’s how David must have felt when he finally found himself on the throne of Israel. But I bet he wouldn’t trade the cave sessions for anything. The lessons learned were too valuable.
If you’re in the cave of Adullam, give God the sacrifice of praise. It’s an opportunity to prove your integrity. Let God write music in you, through you. If you stay patient and persistent, God is going to come through for you. You’ll look back on this season with fond memories because they forged faith in you.
So keep on keeping on.
The best is yet to come.