In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

by Mark Batterson

How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos. G.K. C

In 1997, a team of IBM engineers designed and developed Deep Blue, the computer that outmaneuvered chess grand master Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue was equipped with thirty-two processing engines that could calculate 200 million chess moves per second. I don’t know about you, but I have a tough time with the fifty-fifty stuff. True or false. Right or left. Chocolate or vanilla. I can’t even imagine contemplating 200 million contingencies in a split second. But 200 million contingencies is laughable compared to the Omniscient One who took every contingency into consideration before a nanosecond had even ticked off the clock of time. Think of your life as a game of chess. You are the pawn and God is the Grand Master. You have no idea what your next move should be, but God already has the next 200 million moves planned out. Some of His moves won’t make sense, but that is simply because we can’t compute 200 million contingencies at a time! We’ve just got to trust the Grand Master.

The cure for the fear of failure is not success. It’s failure. The cure for the fear of rejection is not acceptance. It’s rejection. You’ve got to be exposed to small quantities of whatever you’re afraid of. That’s how you build up immunity.

at the end of the day, I’d rather be disliked for who I am than liked for who I’m not.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas identify neoteny as an indispensable quality of leadership in their book Geeks and Geezers. Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks—open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings.5

Sir John Kirk, the nineteenth-century British naturalist, once said that if he had his way, there would always be a little child positioned in the heart of London—perhaps in the precincts of Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral. And he said that no one would be allowed to contest a seat in Parliament or become a candidate for public office until he had spent a day with that child and passed an examination in the child’s novel methods of thought, feeling, and expression. When I first read that, I thought to myself, What a fascinating idea. And then I realized that is precisely what Jesus did. He proverbially positioned a child in the heart of the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of God is child-centric. The way we grow up spiritually is by becoming more and more like a little child.

Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning. JOHN HENRY CARDINAL NEWMAN