Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables

by Phil Vischer

Imagine me trying to explain to God why I “deserve” a nicer car than the guy next to me. “Well, I’ve worked so hard, and—as I’m sure you can see—I’m very successful.” Ha. Good one. Seeking our own comfort over the comfort of others is a pretty good definition of the word sin.

Tell me, how easy is it to serve someone you consider less deserving than yourself? Nearly impossible. Want to kill a company quickly? Decide you are “better” than your customers. Executive pride kills companies. Christian selflessness, on the other hand, is not just biblically sound, it is also good business.

From now on, I will do whatever I can to eradicate the presumption within any organization I lead that executives “deserve” more than the regular people around them. For me, from here on out, it starts with a Dodge Neon from Dollar Rent-a-Car and a room at the Hampton Inn.

Thing I Learned #3: If you successfully identify a need and create a product that meets it in a unique way, you are the expert. Even if you’re a twelve-year-old junior high dropout. Even if the guy next to you has a Harvard MBA and a Fortune 500 pedigree. In the business that was born out of your brain and your instincts, you are the expert. You may find someone who can help you immensely with human resources or finance or marketing. You may find a brilliant consultant who can ask poignant questions that will help further refine your thinking. But when it comes down to your product and the way it meets the needs of your audience, I’ll say it one more time, you are the expert.

Every good hire brings something vital to an organization. Each new team member, however, needs to recognize what it is you brought that made the organization spring to life in the first place.

Thing I Learned #4: Know yourself. Lesson 3 can get me into all sorts of trouble if I don’t have a good grasp of my own strengths and weaknesses. There are areas where I should look to others for help, and there are areas where others should look to me. I need to figure out which areas are which before I start hiring, because hiring people whose strengths complement my own will be the key to my future success. Also, beware of early success. Seeing my first idea turn to gold convinced me that all my ideas would turn to gold, which was not the case. Early success can be a very dangerous thing.

Thing I Learned #5: Bigger is no longer better. In some cases larger organizations do have a competitive advantage, but those cases are becoming fewer and fewer all the time. I wanted my own animation studio. My own design studio. My own sound studio. Why? Because I thought all that creative capability would create more opportunities. I thought a larger staff would mean greater impact. In reality, the opposite was true. A larger staff meant higher permanent overhead, and higher permanent overhead actually reduced the range of opportunities we could pursue. Sure, we had people who could do all sorts of amazing things. We could make movies. We could make kids’ books. We could make rec...

The only thing that was guaranteed to cover our overhead was more VeggieTales, so all other opportunities fell by the wayside. The thing that was supposed to enable me to pursue all sorts of new ideas ultimately sealed me into a tight little box. By the late-1990s, the world was full of great design studios, sound studios, and animation studios all excited to pitch in on great projects. What the world was missing was the stories themselves, which is what I did best. Real impact today comes from building great relationships, not huge organizations. More overhead equals less flexibility to pursue unexpected opportunities. (Boy, do I wish I’d learned that one sooner.) Smaller—and smarter—is better.

Thing I Learned #6: If I had it to do all over again, I would let my business model determine my pay scales. This is a tricky one. We produced our first eight videos with average production salaries in the mid-$30,000s. Our team was happy, though not highly paid. Since VeggieTales had yet to “explode,” low salaries were key to our business model.

Big Idea’s animation studio was just too expensive for our business model. We could cut our production costs by a third, they estimated, by outsourcing our animation to any of a number of competent studios in Canada.

We would have had to settle for the team we could pull together that valued the work, the environment, and the mission more than the money. We would have had to grow more slowly.

A team so motivated by the work and the environment that they were willing to forgo Hollywood compensation would have been a wonderfully tight team—a team that would have been an awful lot of fun to work with.

This may be a bit controversial, but I’m not so sure compensation scales are a “moral” issue, at least once you exceed the very bottom of the range. If I create a business model that works only if I pay animators half the going rate in Hollywood, and we find it impossible to hire competent animators at that rate, I know my business model is invalid. It won’t work. On the other hand, if enough animators turn up willing to work for that pay scale, the business model may be valid. Turnover will undoubtedly be on the high side, as many of the better animators will move on to higher-paying work, but if we can build turnover into our business model, the business still works.

People give up extra money to do all sorts of things they love. Stockbrokers become third-grade teachers. Bankers open coffee shops. Advertising executives wander off to write children’s books. Is it that insane to think you could build and maintain an animation studio filled with talented folks jazzed enough about the ministry impact of their work to sacrifice some extra money? The point is, some things are more important than money.

Thing I Learned #7: Build a team that rows in the same direction. Jim Collins’s research was pretty darn conclusive: companies that last do so largely by building their missions and values into their cultures. As

Diversity is a wonderful thing, as long as the diversity isn’t around the purpose and values of the group itself.

My vagueness about Big Idea’s true mission and values led to a profoundly confused, dysfunctional workplace.

“I am a Christian,” I said, “and I believe the Bible exclusively holds the truth about our standing before God and the path to restore our relationships with him. I want to share that truth with our culture. That is, at the end of the day, what Big Idea is about.”

“If that’s what this is about, I need to opt out.” The room went deathly silent. I felt like a complete idiot. The man I had hired to help me accomplish my mission lacked my motivation entirely. I was mortified to realize that my failure to get to know him before—or after—offering him the most important job in the company had greatly contributed to the organizational mess my ministry had become.

Inside Big Idea, however, things were not so rosy. My life had become so unpleasant that my Christian background suggested one of two scenarios must be true: (1) I was doing something horribly wrong, or (2) I was doing something horribly right, and, as a result, was coming under withering spiritual attack. My pride insisted it must be the latter, but deep inside I wondered if that were the case.

God did not kill Big Idea. I never for a second blamed God for the collapse of my dream. I dusted the body for fingerprints, and they were all mine. What I wrestled with, instead, was the fact that God could have saved Big Idea Productions. He could have stepped in, erased my mistakes, and kept Bob and Larry in my hands for the sake of the kingdom. I mean, he’s God, right? He can do anything. But he didn’t.

“Only one life, ‘twill soon be past—only what’s done for Christ will last.” As a kid, that phrase really hit me. If the only things that mattered were the things I did for Christ, well, that’s what I wanted to do. But there was another saying that stuck with me: “God can’t steer a parked car.” These phrases may not have been Scripture, but they sure smelled like it.

He opened his talk by saying, “What does it mean when God gives you a dream, and he shows up in it and the dream comes to life, and then, without warning, the dream dies? What does that mean?” He had my attention.

After a lifetime of tireless Christian service, the emotion of seeing God bring a dream to life, only to let it die, was more than he could bear.

Elisha called the woman back and proclaimed, “A year from now you will hold a son.” Her response to Elisha’s promise shows how deep this longing must have been. “No, my Lord,” she said, “Do not lie to me.” She wasn’t calling Elisha a liar, of course. What she was really saying was, Don’t go there. Don’t touch that. Don’t play with my emotions. It has taken me years to put that dream to sleep. Don’t wake it up.

That is the story of the Shunammite woman. I know what you’re thinking because I thought the same thing myself: What is the point of all that? I mean, why put the poor woman through that exercise? The young pastor concluded his sermon by saying, “If God gives you a dream, and the dream comes to life and God shows up in it, and then the dream dies, it may be that God wants to see what is more important to you—the dream or him.”

C. S. Lewis said, “He who has God plus many things has nothing more than he who has God alone.”

“If God gives you a dream, and the dream comes to life and God shows up in it, and then the dream dies, it may be that God wants to see what is more important to you—the dream or him. And once he’s seen that, you may get your dream back. Or you may not, and you may live the rest of your life without it. But that will be okay, because you’ll have God.”

“Okay,” God replied, “first I’ll give you a son.” Fifteen years later, here comes Isaac. Like the Shunammite woman, we can only imagine how much Abraham loves Isaac—after all, not only is Isaac his son, he’s his dream! His promise! And then one day God shows up and says, “What do you love more, your dream or me?”

As this truth sunk in, I found myself facing a God I had never heard about in Sunday school—a God who, it appeared, wanted me to let go of my dreams. But why? Why would God want us to let go of our dreams? Because anything I am unwilling to let go of is an idol, and I am in sin. The more I thought about my intense drive to build Big Idea and change the world, the more I realized I had let my “good work” become an idol that defined me. Rather than finding my identity in my relationship with God, I was finding it in my drive to do “good work.” The more I dove into Scripture, the more I realized I had been deluded. I had grown up drinking a dangerous cocktail—a mix of the gospel, the Protestant work ethic, and the American dream. My eternal value was rooted in what I could accomplish.

The most important thing, though, was to be busy. Industrious. Hardworking. A self-made man—er, Christian. The Savior I was following seemed, in hindsight, equal parts Jesus, Ben Franklin, and Henry Ford. The Christians my grandparents admired—D. L. Moody, R. G. LeTourneau, Bill Bright—were fantastically enterprising. The Rockefellers of the Christian world.

How many people will be in heaven because of your efforts? Impact, man! Clearly, Henri was a loon. Mother Teresa—she was pretty good—but think what she could have done with an MBA and a business plan.

A few paragraphs down I read these words: “If you start something and it does not seem to go well, consider carefully that God, on purpose, may not be authenticating what you told the people because it did not come from Him, but from your own head. You may have wanted to do something outstanding for God and forgot that God does not want that. He wants you to be available to Him, and more important, to be obedient to Him.”

Day five: “It is not what is in your heart, nor what you want to accomplish for God, nor what you want to see in your church, nor even what you want to see in your group of churches. The key is not what you want to see (your vision), but what is in God’s heart and what is in His mind.”

“We have no business telling God what we want to accomplish for him or dreaming up what we want to do for him.” And “The people of God are not to be a people of vision; they are to be a people of revelation.” What? That’s blasphemy! Or at the very least, highly un-American! Of course we’re supposed to be people of vision! There’s that verse—Proverbs 29:18—“For lack of vision, the people perish.” Ha!

Proverbs 29:18 has nothing to do with the children of God being “visionary thinkers” and everything to do with the children of God falling into chaos and sin when they ignore what God has revealed to them through his Word.

“We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (Ephesians 2:10). There you go. Gas up the car! Let’s get busy! Wait a minute, Paul wasn’t finished: “. . . which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). That second part of the verse is kind of interesting. According to Paul, God had in mind even before I was born the “good work” he wanted me to do. I don’t have to dream it up, I don’t have to read a hundred business books and craft a “vision paper,” I don’t have to try a bunch of stuff and see what works. I just have to stop and listen. The problem with the saying “God can’t steer a parked car” is that, while it’s cute, it isn’t biblical. When people of great faith in the Bible don’t know what God wants them to do, they don’t just run off and make stuff up. They wait on him.

I think we need to focus our attention a little more on what Noah did with the first five hundred years of his life. “Well, wait—we don’t know what he did!” No, we know exactly what he did. Genesis 6:9 says, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God.” What did Noah do for the first five hundred years of his life? He walked with God.

The Christian life wasn’t about running like a maniac; it was about walking with God. It wasn’t about impact; it was about obedience. It wasn’t about making stuff up; it was about listening. Noah didn’t hit the ground running and get “busy,” sketching out visionary ideas on his white-board.

would instead focus their passion on walking with God on a daily basis, the world would change. What is “walking with God?” Simple. Doing what he asks you to do each and every day. Living in active relationship with him. Filling your mind with his Word, and letting that Word penetrate every waking moment.

Week two, day four: “When God encounters His people . . . sin is exposed immediately. People cry out to God, ‘Oh God, forgive me!’

In the quiet of our attic, as the remains of my company were being packed up and carted away, I realized my total preoccupation with my own dreams and ideas had rendered me virtually useless to the people around me. Useless. I was failing to demonstrate God’s love. I was failing to walk with God. “Oh God, forgive me,” I said, falling to my knees.

And every day I would walk to my office and spend the morning reading the Bible and praying. No agenda. No video to write, no sermon to compose, no strategy for global evangelism to craft. Just reading and praying. This went on for weeks. At first I was anxiously expecting God to reveal the next “big thing”—the next mountain he wanted me to climb—the next life-changing story he wanted me to write. But after a few weeks stretched into a few months, I didn’t care so much anymore. Eventually it struck me that I no longer felt the need to write anything. I didn’t need to have any impact at all. Whatever needs I had were being met by the Scripture I was reading and by the life of prayer I was developing. My passion was shifting from impact to God.

It took several months, but what I was starting to feel I can only describe as a sense of “giving up”—of “dying.” It actually frightened me at first, because I wasn’t sure exactly what was dying in me. And then one day it was clear. It was my ambition. It was my will. It was my hopes, my dreams. My life.

I started a new company in 2005 called Jellyfish. Why the name? Well, jellyfish are cute and sort of silly, but there’s a deeper meaning. Jellyfish can’t locomote. They can’t choose their own course. They can go up a little, and they can go down a little, but to get anywhere laterally—to go from point A to point B—they have to trust the current. For a jellyfish, long-range planning is an act of extreme hubris. Lunacy, really. And so it is for me. I believed I could change the world, and the weight of that belief almost crushed me. But guess what—apart from God, I can do nothing. I can’t get anywhere. I’m useless. Spineless. Without form. My ability to accomplish anything good is dependent on my willingness to dwell in the current of God’s will. To wait on God and let him supply my form and my direction. Like a jellyfish.

Where I am tomorrow is none of my business. So our plan at Jellyfish—and it’s an odd one, I’ll admit—is to make no long-range plans unless God gives them explicitly. No “BHAGs,” no inspiring PowerPoint vision statements. Just a group of people on their knees, trusting God for guidance each day. Holding everything loosely but God himself.

Several middle-aged men thanked me profusely, fighting back tears as they told stories of their own failed endeavors and the waves of self-doubt and confusion that had ensued. An older faculty member remarked that it was the first standing ovation he could remember in his long tenure at the university. The head of the business school vowed to make my talk required listening for all future business students. “You should write a book!” several said.

But God was clearly working, and, as Henry Blackaby says, one of the easiest and best ways to experience God is to identify where he is working and join him there.

Okay, that wasn’t too hard—maybe I can do this. Eighty thousand words later, you may be convinced I was wrong. But that would be okay, because God has taught me to focus not on results, but on obedience. Not on the destination, but on the journey.

He loves you even when you aren’t doing anything at all. We really shouldn’t attempt to do anything for God until we have learned to find our worth in him alone.