Stupid God wishes

I need to confess something about a phrase I use.

When a pastor or a founder tells me God gave them a dream, and then I look at the plan and there is no cash reserve, no leadership bench, no honest budget, and no timeline that survives contact with a calendar, I have a name for it. I call those the stupid God wishes. We have a dream from God, but we are not walking in wisdom to put ourselves in a position for God to do that.

It is not a gentle phrase. I keep it because it is the only thing I have found that gets past the armor, and because I have earned the right to say it the hard way.

The Genesis 12 part

Years ago my wife and I sold our house in Charlotte and moved to San Antonio. The promise we were holding was Genesis 12, where God tells Abraham to get up, leave, and start walking in a direction. I believe God said that to us. I would do it again.

But I have noticed what that story does in a room when I tell it carelessly. Leaders hear “sold the house and went,” and they file it as permission. Permission to skip the part where you count the cost. And I did count it. I am huge on counting the cost before we jump on the journey, and I was counting it the whole way to Texas. Faith did not replace the spreadsheet. Faith is why I bothered to build one.

So the revision I have made over the years is not about whether God speaks. It is about what obedience looks like on the Tuesday after He does.

The ten spies were not wrong

Twelve men go into the land, ten come back afraid, and we teach the ten as the villains. They were not wrong. It was a land of giants. What was misplaced was their faith: they put it in their own power and measured that power against the giants.

That is the whole tension in one story. The leader who counts the giants and goes anyway, trusting God rather than his own arm, is the one I want to work with. The leader who refuses to count the giants at all is making a stupid God wish and calling it courage.

The ten spies were not wrong about the giants. They were wrong about where they put their faith.

A number that keeps me honest

I use a piece of back-of-envelope math with growing organizations. Let’s say God does half of what you believe you can do. That is still a doubling. Work that out over a few years and you are looking at roughly 30 percent growth every year, which most boards would call aggressive.

Two things happen when I run that math with a leader. The ambitious ones realize their plan is reasonable and stop apologizing for it. The presumptuous ones realize that even the discounted version requires a controller they have not hired and a reserve they have not funded.

What the board is actually thinking

If you lead a faith-driven organization, your board members and your finance leader are holding a tension they may not say out loud. One of them put it to me as reality and hope. They do not want to squash hope or anticipation. They also have to work in reality. They want the vision, written in a way that lets them say yes without betting the organization on a word they did not personally receive.

Any good strategist can build a plan. But if a church has not sat with the Lord and said, this is what we are supposed to be doing right now, the plan will be limited on execution. And if the church has sat with the Lord and has no plan, the same thing happens from the other side. Prayer and practicality. I have never seen one carry an organization without the other.

Pencil, not Sharpie

The last piece is how tightly to hold the plan once you have it. At Novum we rarely write with Sharpie. Most of what we decide is written in pencil: this is what we need to do, and we may erase that last sentence six months from now. That is not a lack of conviction. It is what conviction looks like when you also believe God is still speaking.

I have said the same thing to my own team in seasons of change: we are in a season of discernment, we know the next season will be different, and as I pray and seek counsel I want you to know that is where we are. Nobody has ever heard that and lost faith in me. A few have heard false certainty and lost it fast.

Faith is our foundation at Novum. It is never our sword. It means we hold ourselves to a higher standard, not a lower one, which in this sector is sometimes what faith has been allowed to mean. A dream from God deserves a leader who has done the wisdom work to be ready for it. That is the whole point of the unkind phrase.