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

by Mark Batterson

It’s my life message, my life motto: Chase the lion.

Dreaming big enables you to fail forward.

God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time. A sense of destiny is our birthright as followers of Christ. God is awfully good at getting us where He wants us to go. But here’s the catch: The right place often seems like the wrong place, and the right time often seems like the wrong time.

God is in the résumé-building business. He is always using past experiences to prepare us for future opportunities. But those God-given opportunities often come disguised as man-eating lions. And how we react when we encounter those lions will determine our destiny. We can cower in fear and run away from our greatest challenges. Or we can chase our God-ordained destiny by seizing the God-ordained opportunity.

What sets lion chasers apart isn’t the outcome. It’s the courage to chase God-sized dreams. Lion chasers don’t let their fears or doubts keep them from doing what God has called them to do.

Too often our prayers revolve around asking God to reduce the odds in our lives. We want everything in our favor. But maybe God wants to stack the odds against us so we can experience a miracle of divine proportions. Maybe faith is trusting God no matter how impossible the odds are. Maybe our impossible situations are opportunities to experience a new dimension of God’s glory.

The more we grow, the bigger God should get. And the bigger God gets, the smaller our lions will become.

God wants you to get where God wants you to go more than you want to get where God wants you to go.

God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him. God is great but because nothing is too small for Him either.

Lion chasers thrive in the toughest circumstances because they know that impossible odds set the stage for amazing miracles. • The mistake most of us make when it comes to God is that we think He is four-dimensional. But God has no dimensional limits. • How you think of God will determine who you become.

God is always working behind the scenes, engineering our circumstances and setting us up for success. • The more we grow, the bigger God should get. And the bigger God gets, the smaller our lions become. • The reality is that nothing is too difficult for God.

So here is my advice: Don’t let mental lions keep you from experiencing everything God has to offer.

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.

Courage is doing what is right regardless of circumstances or consequences.

So here is my question: Are you living your life in a way that is worth telling stories about?

Don’t let mental lions keep you from experiencing everything God has to offer. • Half of spiritual growth is learning what we don’t know. The other half is unlearning what we do know. • It is the failure to unlearn irrational fears and misconceptions that keeps us from becoming who God wants us to be.

It’s our past problems that prepare us for future opportunities. So someday we may be as grateful for the bad things as the good things because the bad things helped prepare us for the good things.

Maybe we should stop asking God to get us out of difficult circumstances and start asking Him what He wants us to get out of those difficult circumstances.

When I get into a spiritual or emotional slump, it’s usually because I’ve zoomed in on a problem. I’m fixating on something I don’t like about myself or someone else or my circumstances. And nine times out of ten, the solution is zooming out so I can get some perspective. So how do we zoom out? The one-word answer is worship.

Man’s Search for Meaning

Book to read

The most important choice you make every day is your attitude. Your internal attitudes are far more important

than your external circumstances. Joy is mind over matter.

Sickness helps us appreciate health. Failure helps us appreciate success. Debt helps us appreciate wealth. And the tough times help us appreciate the good times. That’s just the way life is. I’ve also learned that our worst days can become our best days.

One of the most paralyzing mistakes we make is thinking that our problems somehow disqualify us from being used by God. Let me just say it like it is: If you don’t have any problems, you don’t have any potential. Here’s why. Your ability to help others heal is limited to where you’ve been wounded.

Almost like a broken bone that needs to be reset, God breaks us where we need to be broken.

Opportunities often look like insurmountable obstacles. • Someday we may be as grateful for the bad things as the good things, because the bad things helped prepare us for the good things. • We should stop asking God to get us out of difficult circumstances and start asking Him what He wants us to get out of those difficult circumstances.

Prayer is less about changing our circumstances and more about changing our perspective. • Worship is forgetting about what’s wrong with you and remembering what’s right with God. • God wants us to learn to see bad experiences through the good we have gained from them. • God is in the business of recycling our pain and using it for someone else’s gain.

Lion chasers challenge the status quo. They climb cliffs, move to foreign countries, and build boats in the desert. Lion chasers are often considered crazy, but they are able to do these things because they aren’t afraid of uncertainty. They don’t need to know what is coming next because they know that God knows.

Here is one of the biggest mistakes many of us make in our relationship with God: We focus our energies on telling God exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. In fact, we repeat ourselves over and over again just to make sure God didn’t miss any of the important details. But what if, instead of spending all of our energy making plans for God, we spent that energy seeking God?

“You can’t never always sometimes tell.”

Embrace relational uncertainty. It’s called romance. Embrace spiritual uncertainty. It’s called

mystery. Embrace occupational uncertainty. It’s called destiny. Embrace emotional uncertainty. It’s called joy. Embrace intellectual uncertainty. It’s called revelation.

You have to do something counterintuitive if you want to reach your God-given potential and fulfill your God-given destiny. • Stop spending all your energy making plans for God, and start seeking God. • Faith is embracing uncertainty. • Following Christ reduces spiritual uncertainty, but it doesn’t reduce circumstantial

uncertainty. • Your explanations are more important than your experiences. While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations. • Some of your experiences won’t make sense this side of eternity, but lion chasers know that God is connecting the dots in ways they can’t comprehend.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. MARK TWAIN

I’m convinced that the only thing between you and your destiny is one small act of courage. One courageous choice may be the only thing between you and your dream becoming reality. And it may be as simple as placing a phone call, downloading an application, or sending an e-mail. But you’ve got to push over

the first domino.

It is small acts of courage that change the course of history. Someone takes a risk or takes a stand. Someone makes a courageous decision or courageous sacrifice. And it has a domino effect.

There are people who get out of the boat and walk on water. And there are people who sit in the boat and criticize water walkers.

We won’t regret sinking. We will regret sitting. In the words of German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Hell begins the day God grants you the vision to see all that you could have done, should have done, and would have done, but did not do.”

Small changes and small choices become magnified over time and have major consequences. • Sometimes taking a calculated risk means giving up something good so you can experience something great. • One courageous choice may be the only thing between you and your dream becoming reality.

The goal of faith is not the elimination of risk. • A relationship with God is the ultimate win/win relationship because you can never give up more than you get back. • We won’t regret the mistakes we made as much as the God-ordained opportunities we missed. • There is nothing passive about following Christ.

Success is doing the best you can with what you have where you are. In a sense, success is relative. Success is as unique as your fingerprint. It looks different for different people depending on your circumstances and gifts. But there is one common denominator that I see in all successful people. They can spot an opportunity a mile away. And they seize the opportunity with both hands. They grab life by the mane. And that is what opportunity stewardship is all about.

Points to Remember • Our destiny is determined by whether or not we seize the God-ordained opportunities presented to us. • You’ve got to prove yourself when the little opportunities present themselves. And when you do, God will bring bigger and better opportunities your way. • Lion chasers don’t let what they can’t do keep them from doing what they can.

• If you want to see and seize God-ordained opportunities, you’ve got to live in prayer mode. • If you wait for perfect conditions to seize an opportunity, you’ll be waiting till the day you die. • You don’t have to get it right the first time, but you do have to start somewhere. A dream becomes reality one opportunity at a time.

You have to be willing to look foolish in the world’s eyes. • If you aren’t willing to look foolish, you’re foolish. In fact, faith requires a willingness to look foolish. • Maturity doesn’t equal conformity. • The way we grow up spiritually is by becoming more and more like little children. • Self-consciousness isn’t just a curse. It’s part of The Curse. • Part of spiritual maturity is caring less and less about what people think of you and more and more about what God thinks of you. • Christ followers ought to be the most passionate people on the planet. To be like Jesus is to be consumed with passion.