"How
can I take all your money, and leave you broke
and penniless?"
Greg Lukens welcomed me to his
warehouse with his standard greeting. I liked him
the moment I met him, and was impressed with his
style. He knew I'd be spending more than pocket
change there, and he'd defused my anxiety about
doing so.
I was equally impressed as I
watched him navigate the cavernous facility that
is Washington Professional Systems. The company
occupies a vast subterranean world beneath the
street shops of Grandview Avenue, in Wheaton,
Maryland--the confines of a former bowling alley.
Greg knows every cubic centimeter of this
vastly-stocked outlet--the location of hundreds
of specialty products, stacked to the ceiling on
narrow rows of metal shelves, and their minute
specifications. He knows his forty employees by
name and can recognize them by voice.
Washington Professional Systems
sells high-end audio products to the highest-end
customers. It's the place a major recording
studio will contact to purchase a 24-track tape
recorder, or one of those endless mixing boards
you see pictured on the cover of audio magazines,
with six hundred knobs. It's where a radio
station will phone to order a special broadcast
microphone more expensive than a diamond
necklace.
I was there to purchase some
recording equipment for our ministry, costing
around $2,000, making me, I'm sure, Greg's
low-end customer of the week. Yet he treated me
with respect, and gave me careful instructions
about how to operate the items I'd selected.
If you had accompanied me that
day on my visit to Washington Professional
Systems, you might not have noticed anything
unusual about Greg Lukens' world until you
entered his office. It was only then that the
stark reality of his condition struck me fully. I
watched in astonishment as Greg sat down at his
desk to type out an invoice on his computer--a
computer consisting of a keyboard, tower,
speakers . . . but no monitor. At first I was
stunned by this bizarre omission. It quickly
soaked through my leaden skull that a monitor
wouldn't benefit Greg a bit, for he couldn't see
one pixel on it. Greg, you see, is blind. Not
just "legally blind," but totally
blind--the result of a tragic spill off a dirt
bike when he was thirteen years old.
In spite of this extreme
handicap, he not only founded this
multi-million-dollar business, but manages its
day-to-day operations.
And types comfortably on
his personal computer. He has jury-rigged it to
"speak" to him--to announce each letter
he types, and to beep at him rudely after each
typo.
It was a wake-up call like few
I've experienced in a long time. As I drove home,
I thought of the many problems I bemoan in my own
life which are very minor limitations next to
Greg's blindness. I felt like God was shaking me
by the shoulders, saying, "Stop dwelling on
your disadvantages. Stop worrying about what you
don't have. Focus on what you do have--the
resources, gifts and opportunities that I've
given you--and give your energy to making the
best of them."
Not Dwelling on Our
Limitations
We hardly face a greater
challenge in life than knowing how to weigh our
personal limitations. Each of us, as we look at
our life, is aware--often profoundly
conscious--of certain limitations that we have.
These may include, as in Greg's case, an actual
physical disability. More typically they involve
limits in our talent or potential in areas we
regard as important, shortcomings in our physical
appearance, deficiencies in our health, less
overall energy than we'd like to have, and
circumstantial factors we believe are stacked
against us. And, of course, there's our finances.
Which one of us ever feels we have all the money
we need to achieve our goals?
Against these limitations we have
dreams--those things we would like to accomplish
with our life. It can be extremely difficult to
know what weight we should give to our
limitations in considering whether or not to
pursue a dream. Should we regard them as an
absolute barrier to our achieving the
dream--perhaps even a sign from God that we
shouldn't move ahead? Or should we believe, in
faith, that God will give us success in spite of
them?
Greg Lukens' example is one of
those remarkable ones we encounter from time to
time, which suggest that we ought to tilt more
toward the latter perspective than the former. We
need examples like Greg's to inspire us, for
frankly the tendency for many of us--even when a
dream fits our potential well--is to cave in too
easily to our limitations. We assume they are a
roadblock to our ever being successful. Yet
Greg's example reminds us that even the most
serious limitation may not be an obstacle to our
succeeding, so much as a problem which we can
learn to overcome.
Focusing on Our Advantages
When I consider the factors that
have contributed to Greg's success, at the top of
the list is the fact that he is by nature a
problem solver. This is evident as soon as you
meet him. The whole bent of his personality is
toward finding ways to make things work.
We each will do well to look
carefully at how we use our own mental energy
most of the time. Even those of us who are most
intelligent may not focus our thinking in a way
that is constructive, or that opens us to God's
best for our life. Many highly intelligent people
use their brilliance far more to try to justify
to themselves why their dreams cannot be
realized, than to look for ways to achieve them.
When this is the thrust of our thinking, we
almost surely doom ourselves to failure.
The fact is that we have
considerable control over how we direct our
thinking. Having a realistic understanding of our
personal limitations is critical. But dwelling
on them is always counter-productive. And it's
not honoring to God to do so. In general, we
should give much more attention to looking for
ways to solve problems, than to trying to explain
why they cannot be remedied. When we're able to
make this mental shift, we're often surprised by
the difference it makes. We begin to see answers
to "impossible" predicaments, and ways
to pursue dreams which before had eluded us.
The Benefit of Vision
There is a second characteristic
that I believe accounts for Greg Lukens' triumph
over his disability, and it's what I would simply
call vision. Greg is someone with
substantial vision. I say this not to be cute;
I'd use the same term even if he didn't suffer a
visual handicap. By this I mean that Greg has focus.
He had a clear dream of something he wanted to
accomplish with his life, and it was a passionate
dream, which fueled his energy and defined how he
spent his time. Most important, he focused more
upon the results he wanted to reach than upon the
problems that might keep him from getting there.
We shouldn't underestimate the
value that a sense of vision can provide for any
of us, especially if we feel stuck in a rut and
uncertain how to move forward with our life.
Having a dream we want to pursue, and
establishing goals we want to reach--even if they
are very long-term ones--can do wonders to focus
our thinking, and to help us find the courage to
take otherwise scary steps of faith.
The point is not that God would
necessarily expect any of us to build a major
business, as Greg has, or to achieve outrageous
financial success. Our vision should fit the
unique gifts and interests God has given us. Yet
having vision can make all the difference in how
our potential is realized.
We tend to think that others who
have reached points in life to which we aspire
have done so because they are more talented than
we are, or are less cursed with obstacles in
their path. Yet when we look closely at these
people, we so often find that their potential
isn't any greater than our own--perhaps even
less. And many of them have had their fair share
of setbacks and hurdles to jump along the way.
They are where they are not due to unusual
talent, but because of focus, persistence, and
the simple confidence that they could succeed.
A Simpler Answer Than Anyone
Imagined
Consider the familiar biblical
story of David's encounter with Goliath (1 Sam
17). We might assume that David succeeded in
defeating Goliath because he was more gifted as a
warrior than others in Israel at that time. In
fact, quite the opposite was probably true. He
was younger than most of the soldiers, and far
less experienced in combat. There's no question
that many were also experienced with a sling, and
some could likely have beaten David in a
marksmanship contest with it.
Yet Goliath had so successfully
taunted the Israelite army that every last
soldier--from the newest recruit to the king
himself--was convinced that the giant couldn't be
defeated in one-on-one combat. This conclusion
had settled in so solidly that a gloomy
group-think prevailed. Most were obviously
spending their energy explaining why the problem
couldn't be solved, rather than looking for a
creative solution.
David undoubtedly benefited from
not being a soldier, and being outside of this
defeatist environment. He was by nature an
optimist and a problem solver. His attitude
wasn't, "here's an impossible
predicament," but, "why can't
this problem be solved?" In that spirit, he
reasoned from his past experience to the present:
since he had killed bears and lions with a sling,
as a shepherd, he should be able to defeat even
an oversized human opponent this same way. David
may well have concluded, too, that by
dumbing-down his approach--by going into battle
without sword or armor, but merely a sling--he
could catch Goliath off guard and have an
advantage, which is exactly what happened.
What's most encouraging about
this episode, is that the solution David came up
with to a supposedly impossible problem was simple.
Amazingly simple. It was so straightforward and
obvious, in fact, that it's astonishing no one
else had thought of it. But David alone made the
connection between his past experience and the
possibility for success with Goliath. David
defeated the giant not because of superior talent
but because of superior attitude. His
faith-inspired thinking allowed him to see
connections and a solution that others had
missed.
Our View of Christ Makes a
Radical Difference
David's example inspires us to
realize that problems in our own life which we
consider insurmountable may in fact have
solutions--even ones simpler than we've imagined
possible. It encourages us also not to be too
quick to give up on our personal dreams. It
reminds us that attitude more than talent so
often makes the difference in what we are able to
accomplish, and that our limitations may even
work to our benefit when we have a clear goal we
want to reach.
As David's life unfolds in
Scripture, it becomes clear that one factor more
than any other accounted for his exceptional
ability to think so constructively. He had a
vigorous relationship with God, which affected
how he viewed every aspect of life. He sought the
Lord constantly, and walked with him continually.
His view of God was also
extraordinarily positive. "This I know, that
God is for me," David declares in Psalm
56:9. He was certain that God wanted the very
best for his life, and was working continually to
bring it about. And he focused far more on God's
grace and strength, than upon his own limitations
and inadequacies. This led him to assume by
default that many daunting problems in his life
could be solved.
We each will benefit greatly from
taking time daily to be alone with Christ, to
nurture our relationship with him, and to renew
our confidence that he desires the best for us.
We should remind ourselves constantly that he is for
us, and infinitely capable of bringing about his
plan for our life. As that conviction sinks in
more and more, we will find it more natural to
keep our limitations in proper perspective, and
not to let them be the overriding factor as think
toward the future.
Even more important, through
walking closely with Christ, we open ourselves to
his inspiration, and to what Paul terms "the
mind of Christ" on our life (1 Cor 2:16).
Nothing helps us more to see beyond our
limitations to our true potential, and to find
the courage to move forward.
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