From 'Here' to 'There'
6 October, 2010 -
Leaders move people from ‘here’ to ‘there’.
If you’re a leader, you must be able to stand in front of a group of 3, or 30, or 300, or 3,000, or whatever number of people you lead, and say, “We’re currently ‘here’, but some day by God’s grace if we link arms, if we focus and sacrifice, if we work and persevere we are going to wind up ‘there’. This is our preferred future and we will all love life when we get there. The world will be a better place. Our organization will be stronger.”
I used to think that the very first step in moving people from ‘here’ to ‘there’ was simply describing how wonderful life would be if we were all ‘there’. I would cast as hot a vision as I could about what being ‘there’ would look like, taste like, feel like, smell like. Yet I’ve learned something in the last 18 to 24 months. The first play is not to describe how wonderful ‘there’ is, it’s to describe how awful it would be to stay ‘here’.
Think about this historically. Long before Dr. Martin Luther King, the great Civil Rights leader in the United States, gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, he gave hundreds of other speeches that could have been entitled ‘we can’t stay here’ speeches. Hundreds of times he stood in front of groups of people and he said there’s too much injustice for us to stay here. There’s too much suffering, too much indignity, too much prejudice. In the letter he wrote from the Birmingham jail he said we have been here stuck in racial prejudice. We have been here for 340 years. White people still call us boy or nigger. Our women are disrespected, our children live in fear. Dr. Martin Luther King was just building the case. We cannot stay here. And then one day he turned the corner and he gave the speech, “I have a dream” and he described where ‘there’ was - where people are not judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character...and on and on he went. People were ready for the ‘there’ speech because they had heard several ‘we can’t stay here’ speeches.
Your job, if you’re a leader, is to figure out what God wants to get done in this world, figure out what role you play in that, and then to move something or someone from ‘here’ to ‘there’. Your job is to convince people that we cannot and we will not stay ‘here’. It breaks the heart of God for us to stay ‘here’, but by God’s grace, in His power, for His glory we are moving ‘there’.
How do you inspire people to stay on the journey? If you’re trying to move people from ‘here’ to ‘there’, where on the journey are people most vulnerable? It’s not in the early stages because once you’ve made here unthinkable, unconscionable, unacceptable you can’t stay ‘here’. You get some positive momentum. You’ve described ‘there’ and so out of the box there’s some energy that goes “hey, we’re moving, we’re moving this way. It’s exciting.” And when you’re almost ‘there’, that’s exciting because it’s right around the corner. You’re going to taste it, feel it, sense -- it’s right there. This is the part of the journey where if you’re not careful you can lose the whole thing.
So here’s my recommendation if you’re partway on this journey and you’re watching people lose steam...
- Refill their vision bucket. They have lives and responsibilities. Vision does leak!
- Celebrate every mile marker you possibly can on the way to the destination. When there seems too far away, it affects our journey.
Jesus, the greatest leader who ever lived would monitor the inspiration level of His followers all the time and when He saw that they were getting discouraged. He took swift action. He would take them away for a retreat in the mountains where He would pour Himself into them and pray for them. Sometimes He would load them into boats and take them to the other side of the sea of Galilee to get a breather and to just rest. Sometimes He would remind them that they were going to receive huge rewards in the next life for their heroic efforts in this life, but He knew that inspiration matters. It matters to individuals. It matters to churches, businesses. It even matters in families.
So what keeps people on the journey?
It’s a sense of hope that they’re going to get ‘there’ some day.
As you lead, remember that reaching your ‘there’ will be as much about the journey as it is the destination.
Excerpt from Bill Hybels’ 2010 Summit Message ‘From Here to There’.