Printer Friendly
Use Print Command on your Browser
Monday December 8, 2003 Volume V Number 50
God's Net Worth
by Ken Kemp
here is one more thing I must
document. Stick with me here. It’s a lesson in vision. Vision is linked to
faith. Faith is linked to action. Hope emerges when those three are
combined. Powerful things happen at the intersection of all four. Miracles,
you might say.
We are a living witness of the fact.
I’ve watched my mentor, now well into his eighties, in meetings where the mere shortage of funding inhibits the realization of vision. Discouragement sets in. Doubt hangs in the air. He’ll interrupt the gloom with a sharp and poignant reminder, “Well, one thing we know for sure: our God ain’t broke.” I’ve known Ted well now for nearly fifteen years and this violation of acceptable board-room grammar is fully intentional; designed to underscore a valid point. Maybe our fund-raising efforts have fallen short. Maybe our vision is fuzzy, out of focus. Maybe we’ve been looking for resources in the wrong place. Maybe our bank account has been depleted. But our God? His assets far outweigh his liabilities. (Far as I know, He is debt free.) He owns it all. He doesn’t owe any of us anything. To this very day.
Our little start-up church has been there. Barely nine months ago, we were wondering, too – where will the money come from? But in these past weeks, we’ve learned first hand: our God ain’t broke.
So we had a planning meeting just a few weeks ago, now memorialized in a photograph of a bunch of guys grinning at a camera lens, a little red-eye here and there, who met on a Monday night around a conference table in our Pastor’s office. Just a few days before, we cancelled our plans to leave town on a men’s retreat so that we might turn our attention to our own neighborhood, ravaged by the consuming flames of the Paradise Fire. We sat in a building that could just as well been lost, reduced to ash, like several of the homes nearby. We were filled with a mixture of powerful emotions – shock over the loss of life; awe over the surprise attack of a wind-swept, hungry inferno chasing evacuees down country roads, devouring homes and barns and sheds and fences and dislocating animals living in the wild and in corrals and coops and pens, destruction indifferent to status or value, a fire taking what it will in a random, indiscriminate rampage that lasted for several terrifying days and long, glowing nights. We sat in the aftermath of it all, around the table, with no real money, but we were in possession of an undeniable will to respond - to mobilize manpower and machinery to meet the real needs of real people. A vision, if you will.
Something powerfully strong got hold of us. We recounted miracles. We were bonded by a sense of purpose. Pretense disappeared. Ego put in its proper place, held in check. No positioning. No posturing. No debating theory or methods. It was time to act.
Maybe it’s because we got a frightening glimpse of our Enemy. The threat to family and home came into clear focus. That enemy scored some unwelcome victories. It angered us. It was the righteous sort of indignation. It forced us to take sides. And for us guys around that table, it was clear. We were on the same team.
So, we quantified our need. We knew the date. The time. There was an undeniable sense of urgency. We had an idea of the number of participants; how much each team might accomplish in a hard day’s work. No spreadsheets required. Our guys were capable of doing the math on a yellow pad with a number two pencil.
It was Watertruck Dave (so named because he single-handedly commandeered a water-truck from a nearby construction site saving nine homes from the fire-storm), a big man with an even bigger heart, who penciled the cost.
“I can call in the order first thing in the morning,” he said, “and I think the guys can deliver Friday to we can get to work on Saturday.” And then he reported the bottom line – “I’m guessin’ it’ll be about sixteen grand.” That’s sixteen thousand dollars.
A hush fell over the group. For just a moment, all of us, for a fleeting moment thought, OK – who’s on the hook if the money doesn’t come in? The church? The pastor? One of the guys around the table? All of us? Me?
It was a sobering thought.
Watertruck Dave looked around the room, kinda the way he looked over the dashboard when he searched for the starter button on that old water-truck, and asked, “We’ve got maybe five to seven from the retreat fees,” and that was the consensus. “Well?” Dave went on, “…can we find another ten thousand?” All of us looked at all of us, without words, asking the same question.
We had some leads. There was some indication that support might be available. But no one knew for sure who or how much.
“Yeah,” one of us broke the stalemate. “We can do it, I know we can.”
For the life of me, I can’t remember which one.
It doesn’t matter. It only took one.
The simple utterance of the words chased the doubt out of the room; as though we all needed someone to grant us permission to believe. “Yeah,” said another, “we can do it.”
“God can do it,” another one chimed in, correcting the record.
And after teetering on the brink of doubt, we all fell back into the realm of belief.
“Well how much can we raise?” someone asked.
And that’s when the momentum picked up. Fifteen thousand? Maybe twenty? Twenty five?
By the time we were done, it was fifty. We even prayed for fifty. And at the time, it seemed right. The need was there. The leadership in place. We had eager and capable volunteers. This project was perfectly suited for a bunch of guys willing to take on the task and serve with a whole heart. We boldly asked God to do something amazing. Something that would cause the whole community to rise up and recognize His mercy and power and grace. There was a unanimity, an urgency, a sense of wonder and expectation in that prayer that was, well, unforgettable. Unmistakable.
They asked me to write the press release. “He’s a terrific writer,” someone said.
“I’ll do it,” I told them.
And I did. The local paper picked it up. “Ridgeview men to raise fifty thousand dollars for Paradise Fire clean-up and erosion control,” said the Valley Roadrunner.
They used my text, unedited, but I must confess that when I sat down to write it, I felt a sudden crisis of confidence. I didn’t feel that way back with the guys around the conference table or during the prayer meeting or as we high-fived out the door of the church building that night saying good-night to my comrades. It was home alone, sitting at the word processor, cranking out the phrases and sentences that I wondered – what sort of presumption is this? Will the community scoff? And what if we go on record with such ambitious goals – announce our plans – and then it flops? Vendors looking for payment – and we don’t have the money? What then?
Did we get carried away by our silly enthusiasms? Was it a case of momentary grandiosity? Were we perhaps suffering from shock – post-traumatic syndrome, hatching schemes that went over the top? Beyond the pale?
Perhaps I should scale it back a bit, I thought as I tapped the keys under the heading “Press Release.” Twenty five? Naw, the guys would pick it up… and see it as a failure of nerve. Maybe I should just leave out the number. “Ridgeview Men seeking unspecified funds...” and leave it open. Naw, I’d be misrepresenting the commitment of the meeting.
Fifty thousand.
I left it in.
I shrugged as I wrote, and hit the send key to the editor.
A couple days later, there it was.
In print.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Maybe you’ve experienced a moment like that meeting when faith and vision and an action plan energized a group of guys who could hardly control their enthusiasm for what God can do. It’s heady stuff.
The small, petty things that occupy too many leadership meetings just don’t find any room at all in the dialog. Instead, it’s wide-eyed expectation. It’s a strong dose of hope. It causes you to rise up and proclaim with conviction – “Blest be the tie that binds!”
It’s later that the second guessing starts. Alone. Reflecting. Maybe it isn’t real. Maybe we got caught up, lost perspective, kissed common sense good-by. Maybe we’re setting ourselves up for major disappointment. All these questions pepper the mind and heart like fiery darts.
And sometimes we give up. We let it go.
And lose the blessing.
I just felt compelled to share this one with you. The count is in. It’s for real. As of this week, six weeks and two weekend work days later, the count is well over seventy-thousand dollars. Seventy thousand dollars. But it’s way more than money.
It’s service. It’s ministry. It’s lives touched. Hearts moved. Spirits opened. People helped. It’s guys taking their tools and their machines and their skills and their talents and learning that all of them can be used in the service of God’s kingdom. It’s building a band of brothers.
And it isn’t over yet.
So now, we’ve learned something about vision. We’ve learned something about what God can do with a committed group of guys who will accept nothing less than God’s abundant blessing. Guys who will see the vision. Affirm and embrace one another. Take a stand. Believe the impossible.
And we want more.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003