Place is important. God calls us to a people (ethnos), more than a place. But those people are in a “place.” they inhabit time and space. And we have to be there. Ministry has to be in proximity to those God has called us to minister. When Phyllis and I felt the urging of God to minister to college students, we moved! We moved fifteen miles from a lovely, relatively inexpensive home on a South Georgia pond between the fraternity houses. And we moved, not because of the fifteen mile commute, but because we knew that being among the people Gd had sent us to was important. We needed to be there. You can’t really minister to people unless you’re there with them.
And I know this flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Since we live in the world of attractional mega-churches where people drive for hours just to get there, we feel we can also commute to the office/church. Since we live in the world of jet-travel, we can do short-term missions with forays into the midst of the unwashed and unreached. We think we can have the best of both worlds.
But we can’t.
And timing is important. Gladwell looks at times to be born for optimum success in certain fields. Now, of course, most of us have a hard time deciding on our own birth! But his point is finding our niche in history - our time for impact. We often glibly say, God is never late; He’s always on time. And so He is. But we can be late. Or even early. Being in the right place at the wrong time is a problem. And I think this is often the Christian problem. Our timing is off. We’re answering questions no one is asking. We’re responding late to things that need immediate action. We’ve just got a delay in our ability to respond. Bad timing.
Somehow, we need to - once again - learn to “walk in the Spirit,” being “instant in season and out” so that we are able to get the timing thing down. If you are in the right place, doing the right thing at the wrong time - it’s still wrong, or at best ineffective.
And we’ve got to be engaged in doing the right thing. Actions must be “right.” What we do at the right time in the right place produce results. Actions - not just good intentions or grand ideas or cool wanna-dos. But really doing the stuff - as difficult and inconvenient and nasty as it might be.
And we gotta be consistent. And I am the absolute world’s worst at consistency! I couldn’t stay on a diet if my life depended on it! (Oh yeah! Yikes, it does! Oh well…) But in some things I am consistent. In reading the Word, in rising early for a “quiet time” (that sometimes gets noisy!), in reaching out to others, in dreaming and planning Kingdom kind of things, I’m pretty consistent.
We have to continue to do what we do - whatever it is - until somehow we become good at it. The writer of Hebrews says (5:14) that maturity is arrived at by those who constantly live in the word of righteousness and thereby train themselves to distinguish good from evil. Constant use leads to training in discernment. You just see it differently.
I was thinking,,, I’ve been teaching the Bible, working in church development and discipling people for a long time. Have I done my 10,000 hours? Have I been in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing consistently enough to get it right and make the impact?
It’s my prayer…
More later…
