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In the book Do Hard Things, by two teens, Alex and Bret Harris, they quote Martin Luther King, Jr.: "If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music…Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."
When a new year starts it is well to remember that an old year ended. We all have one less year to live. Whatever might have been accomplished in 2008 is in the books and nothing else can be added. If too many days were wasted, nothing can be done except make better use of the days ahead.
In the fall, Mission:Chad challenged us to raise $50,000 by year's end that it would match for the purpose of funding the security wall at Village Altonodji. The result was better than we hoped. At the close of December, nearly $65,000 had come in. With the added $50,000 matching funds, as well as some funding received both before and after the matching gift challenge, a total of about $133,000 has been designated for the wall to date. This is both very exciting and possibly very debilitating. To build the wall will take about $180,000. That means that we are still $47,000 short of that goal. That also means that our own efforts to date (not counting the matching funds) have not reached even the half-way point, but our tendency now is to take a breather and celebrate. And if we're not careful, we can assume the job is now done and move on to another project while this one is only half-baked.
When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he laid on his back on scaffolding painting for 4 years straight. His health was affected and his body damaged by the process, but this was the price of greatness. After Beethoven went deaf, he composed some of his greatest music. The focus required to write music that he could not hear made it all the greater. Both of these men could have quit in the middle. And yet they, like all human beings, were intended for greatness whether composing music, sweeping streets, or building security walls.
Greatness can only be achieved by staying the course. A half built wall will be only marginally more helpful than no wall at all. We have nearly as much work ahead of us as we have behind us. But this is where greatness is tested. The second half will take more creativity, more pluck, and more intentionality than the first. Whatever resources we turned to in the fall were most likely the easier to get. If these are exhausted, we may be tempted to believe we've done all we can do. But miracles only happen when we've run out of our own resources. If we quit now, we run the risk of missing the point at which God is free to act miraculously. As long as we depend on our resources, He lets us. It is only at the end of all our "horded resources" as the hymn puts it do we encounter the All Powerful God.
So here's our chance. Last year we accomplished what was humanly possible for the wall. This year, we are now in a position to accomplish that which can only be called a miracle. God is then genuinely glorified both in our eyes as well as the world's. When Nehemiah's wall was at half its height, enemies plotted to attack and knock it down. Things were getting harder. Nehemiah had half the people build while the other half stood guard. When the wall was completed in 52 days, the author writes: "… all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God" (Nehemiah 6:16).
The ideas we come up with in the days ahead to complete the wall will determine whether the hosts of heaven and earth are forced to pause and notice.
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