When God moves, sprint

In January of 2019 I had the job I thought I would keep until I died.

I ran the foundation for Coca-Cola Consolidated in Charlotte and reported to Frank Harrison, the CEO. One week I was in a boardroom with the CFO walking through a multi-year forecast. The next week I was in a refugee camp in East Africa with the World Hunger Organization and UNICEF, or in Sudan with an instruction not to get kidnapped. I had access to the jet, the budget, and a brand that could get anybody in the world into a room. Lauren and I had just bought what we were calling our forever house. We had lived in it for three months.

A friend of ten years named Ed Newton had become pastor of Community Bible Church in San Antonio the fall before, and he kept calling. I laughed at him. I sent him pictures of the jet. I sent him a picture of a four hundred dollar meal with a note that said I was not coming to Texas.

Then God wrecked both of us. I do not have a cleaner way to say it. Lauren and I sat with it and the answer was Genesis 12: get up, leave, and start walking in a direction. Sell the house. Walk away from Coke. Go help Ed for a season.

The three-month offer

So I resigned, and I did what a responsible leader does. I offered to stay three months to help with the transition.

Frank looked at me and said something I have never forgotten. When God moves your heart, sprint to obedience. If I keep you longer than He asked, I become your stumbling block.

He was a CEO and chairman of a publicly traded company, and he was giving me my theological education. Again. He had done it once before, when he asked me whether he should tithe ten percent to his church and then pointed out that ten percent of his income would be one hundred and fifty percent of that church’s budget, and did I think that was healthy. Business people who follow Jesus have taught me more about stewardship than most of my seminary classes did.

Obedience delayed is often obedience denied.

I have watched this in my own life and in the leaders I have sat with since. The delay always has a good reason. The transition needs me. The board is not ready. The house has not sold. The reasons are usually true. They are also usually the stumbling block, and the person setting it up is the one who is supposed to be walking.

What the leap actually cost

I want to be honest about the second half of this, because the LinkedIn version ends at the quote and life did not.

We sold the house. We moved to a city that still does not feel like home to a church of thousands in the middle of a founder transition, with a new pastor who had never led a staff before and a balance sheet that no bank wanted to talk about. It was the hardest move of my life, and we have moved five times. There were months when the courtside seats and the jet looked very good in the rearview mirror.

It was also the most fruitful season of ministry I have ever had. Both things are true. I did not get clarity before the leap. Clarity showed up after it, in the doing, which is the only place I have ever found it.

And the season had an end. Two and a half years in, Lauren told me I was not trusting God, which is exactly what you want to hear from your wife. A week later I walked into Ed’s office and told him my time was up. What came out of that is the firm I run now. I would not have found it by staying.

For the leader who is stalling

If you are reading this in the middle of a decision, I will say the thing I have had to be told.

If God moves fast, move fast. If God moves slow, move slow. The mistake is not the pace. The mistake is negotiating the pace after the answer is already in the room.

Leadership is not managing outcomes. It is responding to assignments. Every major breakthrough in my life has been on the other side of an obedience I tried to schedule for later.

Faith does not wait for confirmation. It responds to the whisper. Then it sprints.