Trust Big and Dream Long

Well hello, friends. One more time. Stories to make sense of it all. I'm Dick Foth, and we're coming to the end of the book that we've been sort of reading together. I've been reading it to you, if you will, over the last months, and and we're on approach for landing. It's the last section of the book called Dreamers. The subtitle is Dreamers' Fuel Hope, and the chapter title is Trust Big Dream Long. What must we do to be doing the works of God? The question asked of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God, that you believe in the one who may sent. January 9, 1956 was a terrible morning. At least that's what I felt at 13. The report had just come over the radio that five young missionaries had been speared to death the previous day by tribal people on the banks of the Kererai River deep in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador. In the months that followed, they became symbols for devotion to Jesus for a generation of young people like me. Women continued the mission. Jim Elliott's wife, one of the five, Elizabeth, and Rachel, the sister of the pilot, Nate St. Later went back into that area to reach the Huarani Indians with the good news. Elizabeth and her toddler daughter stayed a couple of years. Rachel stayed for 40 years and is buried there. Elizabeth wrote several inspirational books like through Gates of Splendor and Shadow of the Almighty. I read them all, so when I heard she would be available to speak in our college chapel, I was thrilled. parentheses, this would have been in the early 1980s. After her very powerful chapel talk, she came to my office for coffee. During our conversation, I asked the question, what's the most important part of following Jesus? Elizabeth, without hesitation, she said, trust dick. What else is there? Walking with Jesus is a life of trust. So is walking with each other. In making the case for friendship, we have spoken of story, affirmation, and covenant as means and methods of making friendship or reality. The result of it all is trust and respect. Reflect on that amorphous English word love one more time. In relationship, love is expressed through trust and respect. I've often encouraged couples to use that language for affirmation instead of saying, I love you, baby. Why not say, let me tell you three reasons why I trust you? That's the place Jesus lands when people who want to get life right ask him how to do it. The question, what must we do to do the works God requires is answered with believe in the one he has sent. The root word in the New Testament for belief, trust, and faith is the same Greek noun, pistis. That noun or some variation of the word is used more than 225 times in the New Testament. Where it is not used is in the gospel of John, what we just read the verse from, which has as its purpose, getting us to believe in Jesus. What John used is the verb pistillo, and he used that verb over 100 times all that to say throughout the stories of Jesus and the apostles and subsequent letters to these young churches. The thread of belief, faith, trust, and the journey of believing is the bedrock of it all. Trust is the oxygen for their relationship with God. Here's the heading for the next section, trust is oxygen for every relationship. When we tell each other our stories, over time, trust begins to grow. That's you trusting me with your past and vice versa. When we affirm each other and start building covenants, we trust each other with our now. As we relax enough to share dreams, we trust each other with our tomorrow. Trust by definition is a risk. On the eve of asking Ruth to marry me, I spoke with her father and told him of my fears that perhaps my parents dysfunction was genetic. Sitting in the cab of his old pickup truck, he simply looked over and said, Dick, just keep loving Ruthie and Jesus, I trust you. And the world shifted to offer trust and be given trust are huge markers in our lives. No passage in scripture speaks of trust more intensely than Hebrews 11. The nouns faith and trust are used 22 times in 39 verses. The great people of faith throughout biblical history are listed by name, Abel Inok, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, and their old call goes on with names like the prostitute, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jeff the David, Samuel and the prophets. Wait, wait, wait, was that Rahab the prostitute? How'd she get on the list? She was not a father of a nation or a rescuer of a people or an art builder. She just hit a couple of Israeli spies overnight. Who was that about? In that moment in time, she trusted the word of the spies and in doing so, trusted God. Trust happens at moments in time. Just a couple of thoughts from Hebrews 11 as we look at Abraham and what God called him to do. He loads up his people, his animals and his possessions, then he heads out. Now, just parenthetically, he was in what today is a rack and he's going up north over what they called the fertile crescent and dropping down into what would be Syria, Palestine. By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive his in inheritance and he went out not knowing where he was going. Abraham hears God heads for a place he's never been. He's in the dark about his destination and therein lies the lesson. Trust only works in the dark. If you know where you're going, plans all in place with fallback options, you don't need to trust God. Our friendships are that kind of journey too. There's much we don't know but we take it one step at a time. The second thought is about Rehab. She didn't play on the big stage like Noah Abraham or Moses but she played her part. She shows us that trust is doing what you can do, not what you can't. Most friendships and most of life are not about the big moments but about the hundreds of small ones. If it's true that genius is found in the infinite capacity for detail, friendships model that in a big way. Friendship is an accumulation of trust moments. Trust looks forward. Trust is a powerful engine for living. It produces energy and momentum in a way nothing else does and though it exists in the present moment, it tilts us forward encouraging hope and dreams. The writer of Hebrews actually started there in chapter 11. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things not seen. One of the best things about friendship is the joy of cheering on the other person's dreams. When I trust you enough to share my dreams, we have hit a new mark. You don't have to be the closest of friends to share dreams but those kinds of friendships make the affirmations so much more real. You might cheer friends on to check items off their bucket list. The things they want to do before they die. Or you might applaud them for an anti bucket list like our friends Kent and Kay have. Their anti bucket list consists of things they have decided that they never have to do again. I love that. Dreams and accountability. Dreaming out loud is a fun thing to do. When Ruth and I were young and had small children, we played this game. If you could build a dream home anywhere in the world, where would you build it? Having recently done a college retreat in Montana, I said let's build a home in the Gallatin Valley of Southwest Montana. We'll be surrounded by mountains like the bridge arranged the tobacco root and the Spanish peaks. There's the east and west Gallatin rivers that have dropped population like nobody's business. We'll be in ranching country. We'll build a home overlooking one of the rivers with a sewing room upstairs for your quilting endeavors next to my library where I can write. And Ruth said what about schools for the kids? And I responded well we'll have the very best international school in the world just to pony ride from the house. When you dream, you can dream anything you want and it's real. Dreaming together brings one very special thing into play. Accountability. Often we speak of accountability groups as a protective endeavor. In men's groups it's a preventative mechanism so guys won't get off track morally. But the accountability that comes when we share dreams is a very different dynamic. 25 plus years ago I was leading a small group exercise with some college students at the school where I served as president. We just finished describing ourselves as animals and the describing each other that way in positive terms. The last question was if you had a dream something you'd like to do in the future what might it be? When they came to me I said you know I speak at retreats quite often and now and again someone will ask do you have those ideas written down anywhere? And I say no. And then they say you need to do that. So somewhere down the road perhaps I'll try to write a book. A few weeks later one of the young women in the group saw me on campus and asked how's the book coming present for? Taking a back I said oh just thinking about it. Then a few weeks after that she saw me and asked again. This time I said I'm thinking of a title. That happened a number of times that spring in five years later Ruth and I finished a book on relational leadership and I thought of that casual encouragement no matter how long it takes no matter what gets in the way dreams drive us and friends can play a part. That dream was tiny compared to other huge almost insurmountable dreams we read about like the one nine university students and their coach had at the heart of the Great Depression. That would be the 1930s parenthetically. Nine ordinary young men from the University of Washington accomplished an extraordinary thing. They labored together in effort and accountability as an embryonic rowing team to take on much stronger rowing programs like Cal Berkeley and Harvard and Yale and they won. In his magnificent book The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown describes what the boys coach saw as they worked with and for each other. He heard them declare their dreams and confess their shortcomings. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust. Brown details in exquisite language, the gruelling training schedules, early mornings and late nights, the lack of money and the desire to quit. He examines the lives and the challenges of each of the young athletes and their years long striving for victory. Then he tells what the coach discovered as nine friends fought for their dream. He came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transported to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing, a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that as they rode, effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for. In 1936, those nine young men took their rowing shell, the husky clipper, to Hitler's Germany to take on the world in the Olympics. And they brought home the gold. Shared dreams push us to excel. That is trusting big and dreaming long. I gotta tell you, I love that story. If you haven't read that story, the boys in the boat. I encourage you to download it by whatever and read it. It's a fascinating, strong story of the power of trust and dreaming, the big dream. Well, I could keep going on rapsodizing about such things, but I have to quit. I want to go get a cup of coffee you probably do too. So I'm out. This is Dick Foth saying God bless and will catch you later.