Nearly every great building, every great accomplishment, every great war, every great movement, took years of planning and laborious engineering. Every Michelangelo painting was engineered with meticulous care, with advanced sketches, designs, etc., before he finally got to the finished product.
It takes a lot longer to plan a building than it does to build it. It took me a whole lot longer to select the property, plan my church building, scrounge the materials, design it, and do all that figuring to prepare the ground and lay the foundation than to lay the blocks, build the walls, and stick the roof on! That was the fun part, the fast part! That was when you could really see something happening! But the people who got excited as they saw the walls and roof go up only saw the smallest part of the job.
Every builder loves to get to the part of the job that is seen—the visible! It’s the invisible—below the surface, long, hard hours and days and weeks and months, and sometimes years of planning, designing, and preparation, and the slow laying of the foundation that’s the hardest part, takes the most time, and for which you get the least credit—but without which there would never be a building and it would never stand.
You can ask any businessman about that: The pleasurable part is the finished product—the shiny new car standing there, the people raving about it. But they don’t see the blood, the sweat, the tears, that lay in the months and years of planning and designing, trial and error, and the preparation that lay behind it. They can’t see the intricate and delicate wiring and mechanical systems beneath the surface, which are far more difficult to install and much more vital to the efficient operation of the car than any nice shiny polish and paint on the surface.
But what really appeals to the people who buy them? It’s the looks of the product—the pretty surface things—the color, the shape, the upholstery. Most people don’t begin to understand the intricate mechanism of the engine, the lights, the ignition system, the transmission system, and all of the other complicated mechanical and electronic parts beneath the surface, which took a lot more time to design and install and make work than the pretty paint and polish.
Even a well-cooked meal takes hours of thought and labor and organization and preparation, and only appears and looks and smells good for a few minutes—and then it’s gone. The consumer can’t possibly appreciate all the time and effort that’s gone into the brief moment that he enjoys it, unless he has been a cook and knows what it is to have to plan the meal, buy the ingredients, and prepare it, cook it, and serve it.
That’s really the way it is with most things in life. A banana is another example. It just appears for a moment. It’s here today and gone tomorrow, and all the hard work of the farmer behind it is invisible! The months or years of clearing, planning, plowing, planting, growing, fertilizing, pruning, harvesting, transporting, marketing—all of this is unseen behind that little banana! All we have to do is stick it in our mouth and enjoy it momentarily, without even thinking about the hard work behind it.
I don’t even understand the clothes I have on. I don’t know what it took to have to design this pair of pants—the raising of sheep, shearing, wool gathering, selling it to the thread maker, the spinning of each tiny little thread, and then the intricate weaving of the cloth into complicated designs of different colors!
Think of the elaborate machinery it must have taken—years of planning, invention, design, and labor that have gone into just the making of the cloth. Then the tailor had to design and plan the pants—how to cut the cloth, how to put it together, how to make it fit, what shape it would be, how it would hang, what it would have—pockets, belt straps, zipper, etc., waist size, length, and all these things! We don’t think about most of these things when we buy a pair of pants. All we see is a pair of pants, and we decide whether we like what we see and whether they fit!
All the unseen handiwork, time, thought, and labor behind one pair of pants! We just see it, buy it, wear it, and don’t worry about it! But it took somebody, or a lot of somebodies, years of time and thought and invention and discovery, as well as labor, to produce it.
Every bit of food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings we live in, the vehicles we travel in, and all the little necessities of everyday life are just the brief and temporary visible end products of generations of thought, invention, discovery, experimentation, designing, planning, and producing, by a world of laborers and a world of labor. “We have entered into other men’s labors, and reaped that on which we bestowed no labor.”1 “One planteth, one watereth; but it is God that giveth the increase.”2
God’s behind-the-scene labors are almost totally invisible—the work of His creation that produced the universe and keeps it running, His design and plan for man, His constant care for His creations from the spiritual realm, that behind-the-scenes workshop where God does most of His labor. Set not, therefore, your affections on things of the earth, for the things which are seen are temporal (only temporary, only the slightly visible manifestation of all the unseen work behind them), but the things which are not seen are eternal (the spiritual world which produces them)—the power and planning of God!3 You don’t know how He did it. All you do is enjoy it! You can’t comprehend it. All you do is consume it!
But somebody had to do it. As Dr. Robert Millikan said, “Behind every watch there had to be a watchmaker, and so behind the intricate precision of this great universe there had to be a divine designer and creator.” Even so, behind every great creation, whether of God or man, there had to be worlds of work, planning, preparation, designing, invention, discovery, exploration, organization, and cooperation, in order to produce the final product—the thing that’s seen—which does not begin to reveal the vast unseen labor and the multitudes of laborers behind it!
With the creation of a new nation, a war, a reformation, or a revolution—or any major change in history—somebody had to dream of it before it could happen. Somebody had to have the inspiration, the vision, the faith, the ingenuity, the genius, the spark that kindled the fire. You only see the fire, and thrill and marvel at its glory. You don’t see the work and planning behind it, the problems in gathering materials, figuring out how to start it and keep it going.
Maybe you used to look at a big business and wish you were the boss, to enjoy the glory and the riches, and to get to tell other people what to do! But you'd have been better to work your eight hours and not worry, lest someday you’d become the boss and work at all hours, and have all the worry! Because until you’ve done it, you can’t possibly see all the problems, the difficulties, the obstacles, the troubles, the complications behind it—how hard it is to know what to do, to make decisions, to tell other people what to do, and to be willing to take the blame for the failures as well as the credit for the successes. As Solomon said (and he should know), “The sleep of a laboring man is sweet, but the rich cannot sleep, for the abundance of his riches.”4 Because possessions, employees, businesses, and governments are much more responsibility than enjoyment, much more hard work than pleasure.
As the great Scottish poet Bobby Burns wrote as the world was toasting his fame, “Would that I were back with the wee sma’ daisy,” “For the best-laid plans of mice and men aften gang aglae.” He was wishing he were back, a wee small boy again, playing on the heather, gazing in wonder at the tiny flowers, without a care or responsibility in the world, unconcerned about the world around him—a world that didn’t even know he existed! But now that he was famous, he had to worry about his work and his writing, the opinions of man, his successes and failures—and he no longer had the time to enjoy the simple, uncomplicated little things of life, or even the poems about them which had made him great. He was too busy!
Most people don’t realize how much goes into leadership: the years of the school of hard knocks, years of experience, trial and error, success and failure, suffering and tribulation—the years of following, obedience, and training, the innumerable lessons, the grades you had to take over again, the demotions as well as the promotions, the failures as well as the accomplishments, the blame as well as the fame, the unseen labor, the unrealized thought, the hours, days, weeks, months, and years of planning, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the agony with the ecstasy—all that goes into the making of a leader!
Leaders are made, not born. It takes so long to grow into the full bloom of leadership that your actual brief span of leadership is short by comparison to the years of preparation!
Most of the leaders in the Bible tried to get out of the job. It’s too hard, and you’ll never get enough credit for it. Most of your work is unseen and will never be known by anybody but God and you, and perhaps a few of those closest to you. Nearly every great leader in the Bible had to be pushed into it. Only in the folly of this world do men fight each other for fickle fame and fortune, for power, positions, riches, and glory—only to find it doesn’t satisfy!
Like Alexander the Great, who, having conquered all the known world, died drunken and weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer! Or Napoleon, who made all Europe tremble at his feet, but died in exile, whimpering like a baby, just to have his boots pulled on, that he might die like a soldier! Or Caesar, whose friends stabbed him in the back at the pinnacle of fame! All these died in vain! The elusive butterfly of fortune weighed them in the balances and found them wanting! They paid such an awful price for it, when it wasn't worth it. They sacrificed everything for it, only to discover it was ashes between their teeth! Husks... Husks... Husks... Like the Prodigal Son in the swine pit, with nothing left but the “husks that the swine did eat.”5
At least God’s leaders, who pay the same price and make the same sacrifices, can look forward to eternal rewards and everlasting glory, and can die with a feeling of genuine permanent accomplishment, from a lifetime of investment in His work, that will reap eternal dividends hereafter!
Most of your sufferings, your sacrifices, and your years of labor will never be appreciated in this life, nor realized by others until the rewards are handed out in heaven, and the medals are pinned on at the Marriage Feast of the Lamb, and the cities are distributed in the Millennium.
Just thank God for your leaders. When the time comes when you see the job that has to be done and there is nobody else to do it but you, and you know you have to do it, God will have prepared you. When it’s God’s will, God’s plan, you’re ready—even if you don’t feel like it! Ready because of the long preparation, planning, designing, and making of a man by the hand of God.
As Kipling said, “If you can meet success and failure, and treat these two impostors the same ... then you’ll be a man, my son.”—Simply because you have the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing the will of God, that you were made for the job, that you can’t help it, you have to do it! He expects it of you!
After all the years in the making, preparation, and planning, you may only be a brief flare which lights up the landscape for a moment in the heat of battle, that the victory may be won. But that lifetime of preparation is worth it all, even if only for that “moment of truth” and recognition by the Lord, that moment of usefulness that you were designed for, that day when you stood in the gap, that hour when you met the need, that time when you fulfilled your mission. And you can hear His, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant! Enter thou into the joy of your Lord!”6
You’ll never fully appreciate your leaders until you have to join them in leadership! We’ll probably never fully appreciate God until we join Him in glory and see what it really cost Him: How much time it took, what infinite care and love and patience. How much unseen labor went into the end product—little old insignificant you and me! Praise His name forever! “All glory and praise to the Lamb that was slain, who hath borne all our sins and hath cleansed every stain!”7
“Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”8
Originally published December 1970. Revised and republished February 2012.
TFI
1 John 4:38.
2 1 Corinthians 3:6–7.
3 Colossians 3:1–2; 2 Corinthians 4:18.
4 Ecclesiastes 5:12.
5 Luke 15:16.
6 Matthew 25:21.
7 From "Revive us Again" by William Mackay and John Husband, 1863.
8 Hebrews 12:1–2.
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