Scott’s Blog

Brenda and I celebrated our 23rd anniversary last weekend. We enjoy the city so we spent the weekend in Manhattan. Some friends gave us tickets to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show and made a contact for us to be able to reserve a room. It was fun. Bren really enjoys the city, really any city. We did a lot of walking and a lot of talking. God has been so gracious to me in giving me bren. On Saturday morning we decided to take a tour and learn some of the city’s history.

We learned that New York began with some amazingly audacious leadership. The story begins in the early 1800’s when New York was just a city of thousands. No big deal there. However the leadership of the time decided that even though it wouldn’t happen in their lifetimes Manhattan would become a city of millions.Never mind that no city in the world had millions of people so there was no benchmarking to do, no example to follow or learn from. Never mind that the landscape was too hilly to be a very large city. Those audacious leaders hired men to level out the hills and lay out a grid of streets for a city that could host millions of people (the word Manhattan comes from “manhatta” which means “flat lands”). Can you imagine the objections they would have heard? Can you hear the naysayers?

Sure enough, through their audacious leadership, Manhattan became home to millions and became the premier city in the world. The city kept growing and began bumping up against some natural boundaries. In fact, what is now canal street is simply a paved over canal that was a former boundary line. That is audacious leadership.

Jesus was an audacious leader too. He was a threat to the status quo. He painted a picture of a preferred future that could only come at the cost of learning from and leaving the past. Audacious leadership is always threatening, it is always expensive.

The truth is you’re a leader. You lead yourself, maybe you lead a family or a classroom or a business unit. Maybe you’re charged with leading a whole organization. God has strategically placed us at a time that is dying for audacious leadership.

You only get one shot at this thing. Don’t waste it simply managing and people pleasing. Invest it by being audacious in your leadership. Ask God for the courage, stay close to him for the plan, then go for it.

Audacious leadership. Now that’s living!

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