Once upon a time I was an air assault helicopter pilot. The patch I most liked on my helmet looked liked the words above. “Fear Not”. Those words appear all throughout the Bible when God speaks to His people. People He’s chosen. People who love Him. People who are receiving the great gift of salvation.
Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
I am saved by grace alone, through faith alone; it is not because of my work that I am loved and forgiven, but only because of Christ. Yet a great tension of the Christian life is that both these things are true: first that we can do nothing (John 15:5), and also that God expects us to work for His glory (Ephesians 2:10). If nothing else, I am meant to stand as tall as possible so that others may stand on my shoulders and see even farther.
Change is the point.
If I am the same man I was yesterday, today is a waste. If those around me are the same people they were yesterday, today is a waste. Every day, move forward. Change is the point.
Continually fix small broken things.
I’m not a terrifically imaginative person. I don’t generally create huge breakthroughs all in one stroke. What I can do is find all the broken things. My responsibility is to fix them. There is almost no lower bound on the size of the problems to fix. There is almost no upper bound on the number.
Progress, not perfection.
COL Bradley C. Hilton
It’s not about perfection. Christ has achieved my perfection already (Hebrews 10:14). It’s about moving forward towards Him and His example.
Slow, steady progress to infinity.
LTC Bernard S. Champoux
Fixing the small broken things sets the conditions for punctuated equilibria progress. It is what holds evil in check.
Day in and day out, move forward. If each of us moves forward a little bit, over and over, eventually we will get to infinity… right?
To infinity… and beyond!
Why stop at the things we know are possible? All things are possible (Matthew 19:26).
In all of the above, it’s tempting for me to focus on technology moving me (and others) forward. However, as much as I like technology, people are more interesting and more important. Technology cannot exist for its own sake; it must exist for people.
The tech is the easy part. The tech will always be the easy part.