Potential

It's late, I'm tired and I'm also so wired there is no way I'm going to find sleep anytime soon. I get this way at least once per week, especially after teaching or facilitating a group of Christ followers. There is something about the energy both expended and received in those contexts that stirs one's soul making the body hard to sedate and the mind difficult to rest.

Tonight, the "buzz" is more a product of having spent 5 hours with a truly amazing group of people. Male, female, relatively old and relatively young, assorted degrees of education and a bunch of life experience thrown in for good measure... we all engaged in something that is truly fascinating: potential.

As cursed as it is blessed, "potential" is one of the most amazing things I can think of. Back in the late 70's, I sketched a design idea on a cocktail napkin and showed it to a professional friend. His comment as he gazed at my sketch was something along the lines of, "Wow, that has a lot of potential!" Full of the sounds of "potential," I walked out of the restaurant feeling pretty good about my idea. I left the napkin on the table.

I never did anything with the idea. About two years later, I saw my idea roll down a street. A guy named Phil Baechler had developed the "Jogging Stroller" and within a few months of his prototype, the idea of a jogging stroller was everywhere! Potential? Yeah, I guess!

Now, I don't suggest that I was the first to ever venture onto that idea, nor do I pretend to think that someone found that napkin sketch of mine and made something of it. That would be a bit too self-assuming. Instead, my issue is with the whole concept of "potential." How many great ideas, sketches, concepts, paradigms have had great "potential" but never "got off the cocktail table" because of the limitation of the humans involved? Either an individual's lack of will or drive to execute the tasks necessary to reach the realization of potential or a group's inability to build enough community and cooperation within itself to get the job done, has likely been the bane of a bunch of "potential."

We live in an amazing age. This laptop I'm using is a contemporary icon of "potential" fulfilled (and continuing to be fulfilled, I might add). Quite likely, as I write these words there is some "techno-genius" lying awake in bed - or sitting at her desk in these wee hours of the morning swimming in the wispy thoughts of the potential of her idea as she tries to figure out a way to "make it happen."

In Genesis 11, laptop "potential" took the form of a tall tower made of bricks baked to a new level of firmness (instead of stones) with tar (instead of mortar). I'm guessing this new design had significant potential because the Lord chose to confuse the common language of the people doing the building because this was "only the beginning of what they will do. They will be able to do anything they want" (11:6).

Tonight, I met with a group of people whose talents and individual gifts are impressive. Some possess qualities that are truly remarkable. And together, tonight we began looking at the "bricks" and the "microchips" that could be the very building blocks of something with more potential than any of us have ever experienced before. Oh... the potential!

While all that potential was being expressed, we also had to lament some of the lost potential we've all experienced along the way. Many, if not all of us in the room, owned varying levels of lost potential. Some were ideas that never made it off the table top, others were moments of responsibility lost and confessions of neglect. The weight of the moment was palpable, uncomfortable and both corporately and individually indicting...and yet... right there in the middle of it all... there was this thing called "potential"... hovering like the nexus of new things to come.

What will take this group to another level? We all took comfort in something that is eternally true: "God can do anything" (Luke 1:37). Now that, has potential!

What potential are you waiting to experience? How might God fit into that plan? Does it help you to know "God can do anything?"