In Stephen Pressfield’s book, Gates of Fire, you have the ancient story of the Spartan’s fabled stand at Thermopylae against the invading Persians, under the leadership of Xerxes.  The story of how three hundred Spartan warriors, along with their battle slaves and their Thespaian allies, held back hundreds of thousands Persians for seven days has been recounted many times, first from antiquity by Herodotus in The Histories, and down through ages.  In our own day the movie, The Three Hundred keeps this tale alive.  The reason it has been told and retold is the same as when it originally happened in 480 B.C.  The tale of three hundred Spartans dying to a man to give their fellow countrymen a chance was such a tale of courage, honor, and valor, that it enflamed the passion of the rest of Greece, so that eventually the Greeks rallied to defeat the Persians and Western Civilization was saved.

A sign in a high school football locker room read, “A confused player won’t play well.” Nothing can be more frustrating than not knowing what we are supposed to do in a given situation. And because we believe doing something is better than doing nothing we often simply do something in ministry with little reflection as to why we are doing it. If our actions bring apparent “success,” however we choose to define that, we will make that our standard mode of operation. If not, we abandon that technique and look for another, seeking through trial and error to find something that will “really work.” Our eyes have a tendency to focus on those who have achieved and we often adopt their methods, not reflecting on why those methods “worked” or evaluating them in light of our theology.

In June the Senior High Ministry at our church traveled to Colorado for Reformed Youth Movement (RYM). I could hardly wait until the bus door closed and we started our trip to and from Colorado! Really, I loved it—24 hour bus ride and all. It was a week of hiking, rafting, mountain biking, ropes courses, horseback riding, attempting to summit a 12,000+ peak, and taking on whatever else the front range of the Rockies threw at us. Each evening we worshipped together with great teaching and a time for small group discussions.