CHAPTER 1
THE FUTURE IS IN YOU
A REALLY COOL THING HAPPENED TO ME. I WAS AT THE ESPN ZONE ATTimes Square for a Cotchery Foundation benefit. The Cotchery Foundationwas founded by Mercedes and Jerricho Cotchery. Jerricho was a star widereceiver for the New York Jets. He and Mercedes are friends of mine, and I wasat this event to support them and the causes they care about. Oh—and I'm abig football fan.
On this night, the Cotchery Foundation was raising a lot of money for severalcauses, but the primary beneficiary was Pride Academy Charter School.Pride Academy is located in East Orange, New Jersey. East Orange sits inthe shadow of Newark and is plagued by severe problems in its educationalsystem—problems all too common to urban America. The hope is that a successfulcharter school like Pride Academy will make a powerful difference inthe future of many kids and the future of the community itself.
So I'm standing there in a crush of people, many of them fans who haddonated in order to be there. They were given the opportunity to hang outwith Jerricho, some of his teammates, and other celebrities. Lots of autographswere being signed.
A woman kind of forced her way over to me. The two beaming young girlsat her side were about ten or eleven years old. "I want to meet you," she said,"and these girls said that you were the celebrity they want to meet tonight." Ilaughed. Politely? I thought I had been confused—again—for an old retiredlineman. Big guy. Shaved head. Still eating to gain weight but not working outenough anymore. Celebrity? Ha! The last autograph I signed was the signatureline of a personal check.
"No," she said with a smile, "we know who you are." Then the girls introducedthemselves and started to thank me. They attend Pride Academy. Thewoman was the principal.
So what did this have to do with me?
Well, I am the senior pastor of The Life Christian Church in West Orange,New Jersey, a fairly prosperous suburb of Newark and New York City. A youngwoman named Rose Mary Dumenigo attends our church. Rose Mary says thatshe was so inspired by the message in my weekend talks that she decided—alongwith three other women—to create Pride Academy Charter School.
Rose Mary was a schoolteacher in Newark. She was pouring her life intokids, as do most teachers, but felt stuck in a system that didn't work. Shewanted more. She heard me say—again and again—that we have the God-givenability to create new realities. She believed me. She started a school.Kids' lives are being saved.
Enter Jerricho and Mercedes Cotchery. In one of our weekend celebrations,Mercedes experienced a presentation about a serving opportunity atPride Academy. She was inspired to become involved. She started RESH 180,a mentoring program where she taught the students values that provide thefoundation for life success. She rallied many other volunteers to serve at PrideAcademy. The Cotchery Foundation has raised a lot of money to help thisschool succeed.
And I got to be a celebrity—at least in the minds of two beautiful kids—forabout sixty seconds.
But that's not the point. The point is that I've had a lot of people, thoughusually in less dramatic ways, tell me that the message they hear me shareagain and again and again has changed their lives and the lives of peoplearound them.
What is that message? Well, here it is. I hope it impacts your life too.
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The future is in you now.
Most of us have some awareness of the future that is in us. We havemoments when we catch our breath in wonder as we briefly glimpse possibilitiesvastly preferred over our past and present. We intuit something great andgrand and from God percolating just beneath the surface of our lives.
We can become fully awake to this future. We can bring this future fromthe nebulous realm of the subconscious into the world of the conscious. Wecan move the mystery toward the intentional. Once we do, we can partnerwith God to create the tomorrow He has dreamed for us—the future we weremade for. We can create our God-inspired futures.
God-inspired futures are futures that are better, best, preferred. But Goddoes not force these futures on us. He allows us to choose whether to actualizethem. We can cooperate with Him in the continuing act of creating the lifeand the world He envisioned. And we can experience more and more what Hemade in the beginning, before terrible human choices messed everything up.
I want this preferred future God planned for each of us and for those welove. I'm not only referring to future generations—opportunities that only ourchildren or even their children will be able to experience. I am talking aboutimminent futures, eventualities that we can all witness sooner rather thanlater.
I want to help you birth the futures—yours and others'—that are gestatingin you but are yet unborn. Countless lives are waiting to be changed.There are always new futures waiting to live. Dr. Thomas P. Barnett, formeradvisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense of the United States, wastasked with the burdensome responsibility of studying the future of the world.He wrote about the need "to imagine a future worth creating" and to "actuallytry to build it." He said, "I choose to see it as a moral responsibility—a dutyto leave our children a better world."
If someone has the ability to imagine a better future and holds the powerto create it, he or she is morally responsible to do just that. We all have facingus incredible potentialities that can cause an entire new reality to exist.When we consider these possibilities, common and moral sense should directus toward purposeful action.
We must take the actions necessary to bring about the promptings inour hearts. In the New Testament, James talked about the worthlessness ofknowing the good we ought to do and not doing it. He said it is a sin (James4:17). If opportunities lie dormant in our minds and are never actualized, weare living inferior lives. Purposeful inaction is a detriment to the future ofour world.
Donald Miller wrote a beautiful book about how to write a better storywith our lives. He said, "A character who wants something and overcomesconflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story." Profound. I think livinga good story is a loaded proposition. One part of good is "interesting." Weshould live interesting stories. The more important part of good is "moral." Itis not enough to live an interesting story; there must be a moral to our story.What great story does not have a moral conflict?
Who can say what is moral? What authority determines what is good?I am a Christian. My understanding of morality is premised on the Judeo-Christianworldview. Whether or not your worldview is the same as mine, Ithink we can agree that there is a difference between right and wrong, goodand evil. And I hope you'll keep reading. Whether you are a Christ follower ornot, I hope we can agree that we can create a good future together.
Anyone who thinks one thing should be done rather than another hasacknowledged a "moral ought." Keep the law. Help the poor. Save the trees.This "ought to" is rooted in the idea that better, best, and preferred must bepracticed in a moral context.
There has been a common understanding of morality throughout time,even though it has been expressed uniquely through various cultures at varioustimes. I believe, as do other people of faith, that this implies the existence ofa moral lawgiver: God—the Creator of conscience. He gave us the ability todiscern right and wrong.
And I believe that the future we are responsible to create must be pursuedwith the idea of what's right and what's good deeply impressed in our minds.Doing this guarantees that our stories will be filled with moral conflict. Good.
One of the greatest moral conflicts in American history was the strugglefor the abolition of slavery. William Seward was a New York state senator(1831–34), a New York governor (1838–42), a US senator (1849–61), and theleading candidate in the Republican Party for the 1860 presidential nomination.The relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln defeated him. Seward,however, decided to continue serving his country during a time of tremendousmoral crisis by accepting President Lincoln's invitation to become secretaryof state.
During his earlier years as a US senator, Seward set a moral momentumtoward ending slavery by advocating an allegiance to "higher law." Heacknowledged that some believed that the US Constitution permitted, or perhapsignored, slavery. In a famous speech to the Senate, Seward said, "Butthere is a higher law than the Constitution." He then made a future-changingargument, based on moral law, against the inglorious institution of slavery.
President Lincoln was influenced mightily by Seward's concept of ahigher, moral law. He coupled that philosophy with his strong conviction thatthe basis of American independence—that all men are created equal—camedirectly from God Himself. The argument against slavery was essentially amoral argument for a better future for a nation and its people. This conceptwas anchored in God's mandate for the equality of every human being, apartial motive for the Civil War, which won freedom for millions of formerlyenslaved people and their progeny.
When Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States ofAmerica, fell to Union forces on April 3, 1865, Lincoln and his entourageshowed up the next day. They walked dangerously through the streets of thecity—now golden streets—echoing the voice of freedom as throngs of newlyfreed slaves flocked the vicinity of the defeated capital. The emancipated surroundedthe Great Emancipator with such force and determination that thesoldiers guarding him were helpless in keeping them at a safe distance. Withdeep passion, this group sang the president's praises, hailing him as theirMessiah, shouting, "Glory, hallelujah!"
Lincoln knew better than to accept such acclamation. He responded,"Don't kneel to me; that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thankhim for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy." Although Lincoln was used asan instrument to unfold the preferred futures of people who had never tastedthe fruits of freedom, he knew that this better future came from God, thehighest law.
So, the future is in us.
And not just any future. It is the future that God has planned for us andour world.
We are responsible to bring this future out of the realm of the unseen andinto the world of the seen and lived.
And we can. We can create a better future for ourselves and others. If wereally want to.
CHAPTER 2
HIGH HOPE LEVELS
WE CAN VIEW HISTORY THROUGH THE LENS OF AT LEAST THREE FUNDAMENTALphilosophies: pessimism, optimism, or pessimistic optimism. Thosewho have a pessimistic view of history obsess over the failure of humanity. Theybelieve that because human beings are so messed up, history will eventuallyspiral down into tremendous failure. Pessimists are the folks we see paradingthrough the streets of our major metropolitan cities, such as Manhattan, carryingsigns for various causes that read something like, "The end is coming!"and offering no hope of escape from our fated extinction.
The other end of the spectrum is optimism, and it focuses strictly on humanpotential. This philosophy surmises that human beings alone have the ability tofashion a better world. Karl Marx, for instance, subscribed to this humanisticview. We have seen the demise of one of its offspring, communism, in our lifetimes.Can't we agree that we are unable to sort our way through the multitudeof problems and unfortunate realities in this world just by human power alone?
In the middle of these two extremes, however, comes a balanced and biblicalview—pessimistic optimism. This system of thought recognizes that theworld and human beings really are messed up, but because God is involved inhistory, there is every reason to believe that things can be better. Sometimes,however, it's difficult to have hope.
On September 12, 2001, I spent a night serving as a chaplain in the ruinsof the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. Man, did I see somehorrific stuff! People were frantically looking for loved ones. Rescue caninesalerted aid workers that something human was in a section of rubble, and Iwatched them furiously work in the hope of finding someone buried alive.Instead, they found only a body part. I spent time at the makeshift morguewhere there was dark surprise that so few bodies were found. And I saw thewidespread disappointment grow at the realization that virtually no one wasalive to be rescued. I had the thoughts most peoplein the world did as they watched the storyunfold: How can there be such evil in the world?How can there be such pain and loss and grief?
While walking through the devastation, Ifound a tanker truck from the West Orange firedepartment manned by a group of dedicated firefighters.They were working hard, trying to put out some of the smolderingfires as well as digging through the rubble, looking for survivors. Just a fewweeks before, I had been asked to help dedicate a new fire truck in town. Themayor had smashed a bottle of champagne to christen the vehicle, and I prayed.I was also asked to pray for several new firefighters who were inducted that day,including the first female firefighter in the history of West Orange.
Well, in the middle of that 9/11 devastation, here stood that youngwoman. One of her first experiences as a firefighter. I wanted to somehowencourage her and those other courageous souls as they fought through oneof the most terrible events in recent history.
I didn't know what to say.
So I simply asked, "Would you mind if we prayed?" The quickness withwhich they formed a circle and joined hands was revealing. We felt the presenceof God in the middle of that destruction, in the buildings destroyed byevil. There was hope. I didn't fully understand it, and I imagine those firefightersdidn't either. But there was hope.
I am reminded of the marvelous Bible story where Jesus was walkingon the water toward His disciples during a tremendous storm. These men,huddled in a boat far from shore, tossed about by perilous waves, were overwhelmedby fear. And then they were sucker punched with a double dose ofdistress by what they thought was a ghost—Jesus walking on the water. Thecloser the image of Christ appeared to them, the more alarmed they became.In the midst of their trouble, Jesus calmed their fears by saying, "It's me. I amreal. And I am here. Don't be afraid" (John 6:16–21, paraphrased).
Because of the presence of God in our world, there is reason to hope.Humanity is in somewhat of a mess, but things can get better. God intends forthem to get better. Because of His active participation in our lives and in ourworld, we can believe that good will defeat evil, love will conquer hate, hopewill crush despair, and we will be led to a better future.
I recently read a book that stated, "According to the literature, the developmentof high levels of hope is necessary to be an effective leader." I like that.We need high hope levels. All is not lost.
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For preferred futures to leave the realm of mind and spirit and becomephysical and practical, we must practice leadership. In some instances, thismay be leadership only of the self. We must lead ourselves to turn an idea intoa reality, the potential into the actual. The kinds of futures that I advocate,however, are most often completely realized only by leading others.
Leaders accept responsibility for others. The kinds of preferred futureswe can build must involve more than just ourselves. We should be bringingothers, many others, into the realization of the dreams that exist in our mindsand in their minds. Leaders do not just experience. They help others experience.They do not just do. They help others do. And they do not create onlyfor themselves. They empower others to create as well.
