Astonishing by Accident

The following is a copy of the Thomas Question email devotional. You can subscribe to the email edition from our website and tune into our podcast.

We have done truly daunting things together without even trying. Consider the Library of Congress on Independence Avenue in Washington, DC. It’s the largest library in the world with more than 130 million items on 530 miles of shelves – which is enough to stretch from our theater in Oakville to Raleigh, North Carolina.

That may not seem all that impressive until you consider the density of information. How many hundreds of pages-per-inch of data does that represent? And it would take you more than a dozen hours to drive through all that information on 1-95, never mind how long it would take to compile and read even just a fraction of it. And how many person-hours does it represent in terms of the time it took to think it, write it, edit it and collect it? Truly astonishing.

Now if you set out to accomplish such a task ON PURPOSE – to accumulate such an astonishing array of information – I think it might break our minds to even think of it. How could you organize, resource and oversee such a mammoth undertaking? How could you inspire – on purpose – so many people to write so many things with such passion? Obviously, you couldn’t. But what is impossible for us to do intentionally and on purpose happens accidentally and all by itself as the human race simply goes about it’s business with millions of people asking and answering their questions and writing down their thoughts as they go. I think that sentence is worth thinking about. The accidents of how you actually live all the time trump the intentions of how you try to live only some of the time.

It’s the problem of litter in reverse. If you get a million people to do a thing only as large as tossing a single napkin out their window, it becomes an enormous problem. One that would cost us millions of dollars to clean up. In similar fashion, millions of people simply writing down their best thoughts has become the Library of Congress – a thing so large and mind boggling we couldn’t have done it intentionally.

I believe a similar dynamic applies in any Kingdom endeavor. Near impossible tasks can occur naturally and organically as a result of many people simply pursuing the Jesus based life with passion. What none of us could ever hope to accomplish strategically and intentionally will happen naturally when enough of us care enough about some piece of the Kingdom to write it on our bathroom mirror and attempt to live it out. All our “on purpose” sentences are like dust flakes compared to the mountain sized message of who we really are.

As a result, I think we sometimes put too much stock in what we hope to “engineer” in terms of impact. We think, “I’ll say this and do such and it will have this effect…” But the net effect of thousands of examples of sincere living would overwhelm such tiny isolated initiatives. The few sentences we design on purpose are drowned in the collective buzz of who we really are in every other way. So our best hope is to simply mean it – as often as we can – as much as we can – and as deeply as we can. Spread across many lives, this collective “noise” of sincere living would become a Library of Congress sized message about a whole other way to live life.

Just a thought…

We’re continuing our series answering the questions you’ve been asking (visit our website or tune into our podcast.), and this Sunday we’ll be focusing on heaven, hell and the good people from other religions. It’s not to late to submit your questions, so hit reply and let us have it. And for those of you who have been asking, there will be a 2 week delay in making the CD’s and DVD’s available – so be patient!

I hope to see you there, and I hope you bring someone with you.


CSW

REMOTE CONTROL PULPIT
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LAST SUNDAY
Jonah's whale, 6 days of creation and other improbable things explained... Visit our website or tune into our podcast.

THIS SUNDAY
Heaven, hell and the good people from other religions.

A SIDE NOTE
This past Sunday was our largest yet. To all who visited for the first time - we would love to be your church. To all of you not-so-new remember that the best kinds of churches are built from the lobby out. There are already more than a few "Thomas Question" stories about great relationships that began with a single handshake. Why not start another one?