I used to think that taking a risk would reduce
the number of friends I have,
but now I know that love draws more people in.
I’ve been teaching Business Law at a local university for over a decade. One year, there was a guy in the third row named John. He could have been a forward for the Lakers at six feet six inches tall. He originally planned to be a doctor, then a biologist, but somehow ended up in the business school at the university and signed up for my class. Half the time I would be flying in from Seattle to San Diego to teach, so no one was allowed to be late to class. I figured if I could travel over a thousand miles and get to class on time, my students could walk one hundred yards and make it. John usually just made it by a hair.
It was John’s senior year and he was trying to decide what he’d do after he graduated. One day, he invited me over to his house where he and some other graduating seniors got together on Friday evenings with younger guys at the university to talk about how to live a different kind of life—one that wasn’t typical. John was a bright and talented guy with an easy personality and a quick smile. He didn’t love people the way that Hallmark says to love people; he loved them linebacker style, in a full contact way. You wouldn’t even know you’d been tackled by John’s engaging love until you walked away, almost sore from it.
I liked that these guys were talking about going off road with their lives rather than arriving at safe places on the map, places that seemed typical to them. I don’t think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we’ve already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go. Living a different kind of life takes some guts and grit and a new way of seeing things. John and his friends sounded like they wanted to take their faith off-roading a little, so when John invited me to come and be with his group, I told him I’d be there.
Friday night came and we had a big talk around a small fire. We talked about how we didn’t need to operate on the same economy that everyone else did. How we didn’t need to do things the way everyone else was doing them. And how we could aim for a life of engagement instead. We wouldn’t need a flag or a banner or matching T-shirts or hoodies or even business cards. We could just do life like a pickup basketball game. If you’ve got a hook shot, you bring that. If you’re not a good shooter, you pass the ball. What’s distinctive about this way of doing life is that there are no score keepers or mascots. You just bring all the game you’ve got. Not surprisingly, the game you’ve got always seems to be enough.
As the evening wound down, I stirred the coals in the fire a little and hoped I was stirring something inside each of these guys. I could tell I was for John. I told him there was no card trick involved. When you decide to drop everything that’s typical, all that is left is just a big idea about an even bigger God and a world that’s worn out from the way everyone else has been doing it. The world has been shouting over the noise of our programs that it doesn’t need more presidents or organizations, what it needs are more friends. If you are a sincere friend, folks around you will quickly understand that there’s no hidden agenda and nothing on the other side of the equals sign—just you.
At the end of the evening, I finished by saying this: “John, I dare you to spin the globe, throw your finger down, and pick a place to plug in. If you don’t have another place you’d rather go, why not Uganda?” The strategy we discussed was simple: we’d go make friends and see what happened. Not the typical version of friendship that is often called networking. Instead, we’d be real friends. John would tell me later that this all struck a chord inside of him. Not like a violin, more like a rock band. John was a guy who I could see didn’t want to just think about this idea, he was ready to launch off the stage and go crowd surfing with it.
Since we weren’t angling to do things the way they are usually done, there wasn’t much to discuss either. Like the disciples, we had no plan, no program, and no preparation. I told John I had a whole fleet of airplanes to take him overseas. They all had Delta Airlines written on their sides and for fifteen hundred bucks he could get on one. A short time later, John ducked his head to clear the doorway of a 767 heading for Uganda.
Just because we weren’t going to plan everything didn’t mean we weren’t going to be strategic. It meant just the opposite. Instead of getting wrapped around the axle developing a plan, we used our time to develop a strategy and we had started in Uganda on purpose. It’s a country that had been ravaged by a twenty-plus-year civil war leaving millions of people displaced from their villages as virtual refugees in their own country. AIDS and other diseases had wiped out what the war didn’t, and an entire generation of Ugandans were simply gone. The population in Uganda at the time had an average age of just over fourteen and a half years old. Uganda had become a nation of children.
When we first began doing our work in Uganda five years before I met John, the country showed the signs of a nation at war with itself. Driving to Northern Uganda in a small car like the one we had wasn’t common—UN bullet proof vehicles were the norm. I envied the UN guys and their cars, not just because they looked manlier, but because you wouldn’t die. Crossing the Nile River that divided the war torn North from the South during the height of the insurgency, we came across check points and roving military squads carrying machine guns every several miles. It was more than a little creepy. We quickly learned not to stop for anyone in camouflage no matter how emphatically they waved. This is because the insurgents and the Ugandan military wore the same uniforms. We drove as fast as our small car would take us to Gulu where there were military barracks nearby and a little more security. Although Gulu only covers six square blocks, it’s the second largest city in the country because most of the population in Uganda lives in the bush.
The entire country had suffered in the war, but Gulu and the surrounding areas in the North had been hammered the worst by the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, who launched attacks throughout Northern Uganda. His strategy for growing his army was simple: abduct tens of thousands of children. The young boys were given machine guns and put out in front of the older soldiers in the fire fights. The young girls were forced to be child brides. Most of these children were twelve to fourteen years old. What occurred with them was unthinkable. When abducted, the children were often made to kill one or more family members in order to alienate them from the villages and shame them so they wouldn’t try to return from the bush. Those who did try to escape were caught and killed in horrific manners as warnings to the others.
Just outside Gulu, we found thousands of kids living in camps set up by the government with no opportunity for an education at all, so we decided to start a school just north of the city. The local officials laid out for us at least three years of hoops to jump through before we could start. This seemed like lunacy to us with an entire generation of kids living in camps without any schools at all and the Lord’s Resistance Army still conducting evening raids to abduct more children. We tried to reason with the government officials for a while about waiving the restrictions, and when it was apparent we weren’t going to get their cooperation, we decided to open the school anyway.
For the next month or two, we got word out as broadly as we could to the half million displaced people in the region that we were starting a school. It would be called the Restore Leadership Academy. We let everyone know what a great idea this school was and braced for a huge turnout as a result of all of our efforts. On the first day of class, we had a total of four kids show up. But we weren’t discouraged at all. We were too busy chest bumping and high-fiving each other. We had a school. It wasn’t Harvard—it was better. It belonged to four kids and us.
John’s task was to pull together the best Ugandan teachers from the North, assemble a student body, and start. We soon felt oversized and a little awkward with more teachers than students. Suspicions were high among the locals about this small school in the bush with a giant of a man named John running it. It wasn’t long, however, before we had twice as many students. We were up to eight. This was explosive growth by our measuring stick. More students found their way to the classrooms, and by the end of the first year we had nineteen, so we started a soccer team. Why not? We had more than enough players. The kids didn’t have shoes and the soccer field had a pole and mango tree in the middle it, but our kids never complained. Instead, they told us it gave them a home field advantage.
Soon, there were one hundred kids in the classrooms that were now bulging. And the kids still kept coming. John called me with the great news about the school’s growth and stories about students who once carried machine guns and navigated mine fields who were now on the soccer field navigating a mango tree and pole. John told me about two kids in particular who were walking eight miles each day to attend classes and what he thought they needed. It went something like this:
“Bob, would it be possible for us to give these two great kids a place to stay overnight at the school?”
“Absolutely not, John. We’re not a boarding school,” I responded immediately.
John’s thinking was kind and caring, of course, but I remembered that Oprah had started a school in South Africa and run into a pack of trouble arising out of boarding kids and I resolved never to take on that responsibility. Besides, we could barely afford the school and the teachers, much less monitor, house, clothe, and start feeding boarding students.
“Sorry, John, no,” I repeated.
“But, Bob, come on. We just need two bunks. That’s all, just two bunks,” John insisted.
“No, John.” I was on my feet signing in the air with my left hand as I was shaking my head vigorously.
“But it’s for the kids,” John pled.
He was relentless.
I could tell I wasn’t going to win this round and John did some Jedi thing I suppose, as I heard myself saying, “All right, John, two bunks for these two kids, but that’s it. Just two bunks.”
“I promise” were the last words he spoke to me about the bunk beds.
It’s now three years later and at last count, we have over 250 full-time boarding kids at the Restore Academy. “Two Bunk John,” as we now call him, spends most of his days conspiring with everyone he meets about ways to make these kids’ lives richer, more meaningful, and more intentional.
Do you know why all of this happened? It’s simple. Two Bunk John got off the map. He wasn’t limited by the contours of convention any longer. Instead, he leaked what he loved. He was leaking Jesus. And pretty soon the puddle he made swallowed us all by the lake it formed. That’s the way the chemistry of God’s love and our creativity work together when combined. No reservoir can hold it, no disappointment can stop it, and no impediment can contain it. It can’t be waved off, put off, or shut down. It doesn’t take no for an answer. Instead it assumes yes is the answer even when it sounds an awful lot like a no to everyone else.
There’s a national test given each year to high school students in the Republic of Uganda. It covers thirteen subjects including algebra, chemistry, physics, history, and geography to name just a few. It’s tougher than any test I’ve ever taken, and John and I wondered just how many of the original nineteen students who had grown up in the bush could pass it. Maybe one? Perhaps two? Some of these kids had been carrying machine guns or leading families when their parents were lost to the war or died of AIDS. None of them had been in school. Honestly, in my mind, this national exam seemed an insurmountable obstacle to these kids continuing with their education. What I had underestimated, though, was the resolve of Two Bunk and the teachers at the Academy.
Shortly after the exams were graded by the national examiners I got a call from John.
“Bob, I’m holding the test results.” There was a mean pause that lasted way too long. “Nineteen of nineteen passed!”
We all welled up with tears of joy and pride for what these kids had accomplished. That’s one of the things about love. It doesn’t recognize boundaries and never obeys the rules we try to give it. It seemed that no one had told Two Bunk or the teachers that they couldn’t change the trajectory of the kids’ educational futures, and no one apparently told these kids that they all weren’t supposed to pass the national exam.
I guess no one told the Restore Academy Soccer team that it was too small, too remote, too underfunded, or too barefoot when it came to playing soccer either. The next year they beat every team in Northern Uganda and boarded a bus headed to the capital to play for Uganda’s national soccer title. And no one told one of the Restore girls that she couldn’t become Uganda’s national top-ranked javelin thrower. Because she did. I didn’t even know we had a javelin. I wondered if it was perhaps the pole by the mango tree she was throwing.
The following year, thirty more graduates would all pass the national exam; as did the next thirty-five graduates the year after them. And no one told the entire student body at the Restore Academy when the test results came in this year that they couldn’t get the highest test scores in all of Northern Uganda. Because they did.
John and I met out in the bush with the village elders last year and we pointed together toward forty acres of gently sloping African tundra that we had just purchased. We had outgrown the school and ran out of surrounding buildings to rent. It was time to build our own school. None of us thought when we were sitting in John’s backyard around a small fire four years earlier that we’d be building an entire village-sized school for more than three hundred teachers and students. We weren’t thinking at that time about where the chain reaction would stop, and we’re still not thinking about it. I’d like to think it’s because we didn’t have a plan. We had a big idea instead. You see, the problem with my plans is that they usually work. And if they don’t seem to be working, I force them to work and I get the small results I aimed for. Swapping that for a big idea means I get everything that everyone brings to the pickup basketball game. Guys like John, people like you, and everyone else who have joined us.
Just like Two Bunk, we’re asking these kids to ignore what’s typical too. We want them to be leaders through action, not just in name. Sponsorship programs are common in developing countries. For thirty dollars or so each month, it is not unusual for a child to have a sponsor in the United States to help with school fees. We got the kids together and explained to them how our sponsorship program was going to work. We gave our kids some seeds, they planted the seeds, they raised the crops, they sold the crops, and with the money, our kids from the Restore Leadership Academy in Uganda sponsor a little skater kid in Oregon through The Mentoring Project, a fantastic organization out of Oregon that helps kids without dads.
These Ugandan kids looked through the other end of the telescope and wanted to make sure that other kids could have the same input from mentors that they are getting. If these kids in Uganda had a refrigerator, they would have a picture of the kid with a swoop haircut they are sponsoring in the United States on it. That’s leadership.
And the chain reaction continues to grow without people even knowing about it. I’ll give you one last example. You probably didn’t know when you bought this book that everyone—Thomas Nelson, me, my friend Don, everyone—gave all of the money away to launch more kids toward an atypical life. What that means is that now you’re part of this fantastic caper too. Because, if I’ve learned one thing from Two Bunk John, it’s that love does whatever it takes to multiply itself and somehow along the way everyone becomes a part of it. You know why? Because that’s what love does.