The Value of the Desert (Bot9 #339)
I was back in Phoenix this past week, a city in the middle of a desert. It’s a pretty amazing city that just continues to sprawl wider and wider throughout vast stretches of dry land.
The trip was an opportunity to participate in a growth experience. I had the opportunity to attend a conference with Jon Gordon, one of the world’s leading experts in leadership. He’s an author, speaker, and the head of a sizable leadership brand and business. He’s helped countless people grow through his books, talks, and the relationships he’s built over years and years in the field. Obviously I’d benefit from learning from him and his team over the course of a couple of days.
But beyond the obvious, there’s an intentional choice that occurs when you choose to grow and learn. One of the pastors I learned under early in my Christian walk would always say, “We have a choice - humble yourself or let God do it for you.” Engaging in growth and learning is an intentional choice to humble yourself. By the very nature of going to someone else to learn, you’re saying they know more than you and you’d like to hear what they might be able to teach you. Luke 14:11 (and Matthew 23:12) says, “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” I’m not going to learn in hopes of getting exalted, but it’s just a potential by-product of the action of growth.
Recently, I’ve been enjoying talks and a book written by Bill Eckstrom. Bill Eckstrom experienced failure. He got fired from a comfortable job and had to hit reset. He was humbled. In his TedX Talk titled, “Why comfort will ruin your life,” he outlines his journey and says, “Only in a state of discomfort can you continually grow.” The product of his experience is a company we use as one of our tools to assess our student-athlete experience and the growth rings (pictured here).
Eckstrom believes we operate within four rings - Stagnation, Order, Complexity, and Chaos. The best setting for high growth is the Complexity ring, the unpredictable environment where the outcomes are unknown. We can’t allow Complexity to devolve into Chaos, but a level of discomfort can lead to exponential growth for those involved.
This idea has to make us quiver a little. Any card-carrying member of the people group known as Type A individuals just shuttered at this thought. Anyone involved in successful businesses or organizations also likely shook their heads. However, I don’t think we should always be in a growth state. Any performance coach understands the need for periodization - times of intense training and times for recovery. Provided that positive growth leads to a time for recovery rooted in order and not stagnation, this can be a great principle to employ.
Growth is somewhat addicting for me. I love learning, improving, and helping others to do the same. As I have the opportunity to challenge people’s current orders for the sake of growth, I have to encourage them that God is with them in that period of growth, and that I, too, am with them in that period of growth. Late in Eckstrom’s talk, he displays a quote from Dr. Serene Jones’s book, What Did Jesus Ask?, which says, “The constant facade of order hides the wilderness that is craving to seep out and teach us that life wasn’t created to be what we think it is…we must experience the wilderness to be taught what cannot be otherwise known.” Those wilderness experiences have so much to teach us…we just have to choose them.
Jesus went to the desert. The Israelites walked in the desert. The desert is an incredibly important part of the Biblical narrative and is then an important part of the human experience. The most unfortunate part of this American life (as I sit warm and comfortable in front of a screen watching a weekend of football) is that it lures us into deep states of both comfort and stagnation. We have to continue to choose to humble ourselves for the sake of growth. The Lord will lift us up when we do. This may include intentional learning, unintentional failure, or many other life events which might send us into the desert. But the value of the desert is immeasurable in comparison to what we experience when we merely sit comfortably.
