As a debater from 8th through 12th grade, I spent untold hours finding evidence in UTA’s library, writing briefs, practicing rhetoric, scrimmaging debates, reading current events, and ultimately applying it all at tournaments around Texas. In those moments, I was so focused on topics, resolutions, cases, plans, arguments, and strategies that people in the room with me were reduced to periphery. Half of the irony is that now, as I look back about 40 years, I am hard-pressed to remember 1 in 1,000 of the pieces of evidence I could have interjected at a moment’s notice then—I recall the topics only in broad strokes, the resolutions minimally, and the details of plans and cases with which I spent a year at a time practically not at all.
We plan and work—strategizing, implementing, assessing, and adjusting—so we can build great things, go great distances, resolve great conflicts. But we do these things so we can see others grow into the servants He has sent the world. And He sends them into the world because He cares about its people. When I receive a call from someone facing what may turn out to have been the hardest day of their life, my question is not whether they have a sufficient plan or program for recovery, but whether they have people around them.
The other half of the irony from my juvenile forensics? That from 40 years further down the road, the only things in the center of my rearview are the people I used to think were peripheral. I remember each of them in great detail—the partner who challenged and sharpened my mind for 5 years, the coaches who invested in me, even the overly confident novices who quivered through one scrimmage only to quit before even participating in a tournament. (No, I don’t feel guilty about that, but yes, I probably should.)
May the people who are in the center of God’s vision this week find their way to the center of ours.