Listening to the Gentle Whisper

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.1 Kings 19:11–12

I have not always paid attention to my life. To be honest, I only began paying close attention when I reached my early forties and found myself in a success panic. I was the president and CEO of a tremendously successful cable television company. I was fully engaged in a good and growing marriage. We had a son who was — there's no more appropriate way to say it — a prize.

And, of course, there was something gnawing at me. How was it that I could be so successful, so fortunate, and yet so frustratingly unfulfilled?

I knew perfectly well what I believed about business strategies and practices, family relationships, and the importance of friends. But I had not decided how I was going to reconcile all of these competing interests. And, as for the most important issue of all, my faith life, I knew what I believed, but I didn't really know what I planned to do about what I believed.

It was then that I started to wrestle with what I wanted out of the second half of my life. I was gripped with an unformed but very compelling idea that I should make my life truly productive, not merely profitable. Making a lot of money has its benefits, but what was I leaving behind that would make a difference in the world? Something was telling me that there was more to life than money. I began to reckon with the implications of the seasons of my life and to listen for the sound of the gentle stillness that breaks forth, unexpectedly, after the fire.

I began asking myself questions like these:

Am I listening for the still, small voice?

Is my work still the center of my life and identity?

Do I have an eternal perspective as a prism through which I view my life?

What is my truest purpose? My life work? My destiny?

What does it really mean to "have it all"?

What do I want to be remembered for?

What would my life look like if it really turned out well?

In the Scriptures, Jesus Christ taught that he had come to earth so that his followers might have abundant life, life to the fullest. That's a wonderful sentiment. And I think its point is missed by many people who think that religion is restrictive and forbidding, who think that Jesus came to scowl and scold and say, "No!" The Jesus I had come to know and love was leading me to the paths of a large life, not a small or narrow one. He was asking me to say a loud "Yes!" to a life packed with significance.

But I did not hear his yes in my first half because I was too busy to listen.

The issue for me was not belief. I was given the gift of belief in God at an early age. But for most of my first half, I was, to use a sports metaphor, stranded on second base. Consider the diagram on the next page, the concept of which first came to me from pastor and author Rick Warren.

First base is taking the simple, childlike step of belief, which is all that is required to become a member of God's family. For me it was a simple acceptance that what Jesus said about himself in the Bible was true. This step involves what Kierkegaard called "a leap of faith." Faith doesn't deny reason, but it is different than reason. It accepts, as a gift from God, a different set of capacities. Without faith we are spectators to affairs of the heart and soul. With faith we can go on to engage the other two capacities, our rational and emotional senses, on the journey of personal growth to second base.

For me the journey to second base was entirely about belief. It first engaged the heart and then the head. Rounding second base involved a shift from being what the Bible calls a "hearer of the Word" to being a "doer of the Word" — a shift from viewing faith as an internally held belief system to faith expressed in the form of loving behavior.

Like the majority of people who attend church and express a belief in God, I was comfortable standing on second base, making sure I believed the right things. I went to church on Sunday, listened to a sermon to strengthen my beliefs, and any "doing" was pretty much limited to putting some money in the offering plate and volunteering to teach a Sunday school class.

There is nothing wrong with belief. It's really the only thing God requires of us to receive his gift of eternal life. But God desires so much more for us than just right thinking. Faith expressed in behavior is "the most excellent way." Paul speaks of this in his great chapter on love, 1 Corinthians 13, which ends, "Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." The Greek word for love, agape, is exactly the same as the word for charity. Charity is the expression of love. It is as if faith and hope were acquired on the journey to second base in order to equip us for the second-half journey toward home base.

Third base involves becoming a follower by expressing our faith in the form of concrete action, usually in a religious setting, either a church or a parachurch organization. And then we are finally on the last stretch, the journey to home base. This stage involves making ourselves what Gordon MacDonald has called "kingdom builders." This means finding the mission in the world that has been specifically designed by God for each of us to do. It is what the Greeks called "destiny," what poet John Donne referred to when he said, "No man is an island, entire of itself."

The second half of the baseball diamond is about good works. It is not at all separate from the first half, which is about belief, but grows out of that belief and gives it integrity. Paraphrasing James's famous line, "Faith without works is dead," I would put it...