Take Your Stand (pt 3)

Hey.  What’s your problem? Does anybody ever ask you that?  Usually it’s something about your countenance, the way you carry yourself, or maybe even the way you are responding that gives someone who knows you a signal that something’s wrong.

Let’s take that idea a little further.  Maybe we should all be walking around with a problem. I mean a big problem; a problem that is worth our best efforts to solve; a problem that if we could make a dent in it, we could literally change the world, or at least change our world, or at least change the world of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people.

Think about it.  Look at all the great companies that we live with today, the icons, the brands that we look up to.  How many of those businesses came into being because someone was trying to solve a problem?

I’ve been reading the autobiography of Stephen Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.  It’s fascinating to know that when he was a young boy, his father was an engineer and had the heart of a teacher.  So he taught Steve about resistors and conductors and how electricity worked.  He taught him all the technical things so by the sixth grade Wozniak was the youngest licensed Ham operator in the United States.

What makes Steve’s story unique is not that he was a young kid with an IQ of over 200, brilliant, smart, and affable, as well as a good athlete.  But Steve had a particular attitude about his knowledge.  He says in the book that what really drove him, what became his problem was not that technology was available and exciting for the geeks, but if all the geeks did was technology for each other, what would that be worth to common man?

It was Wozniak’s passion that made the computer accessible to average people, to people who didn’t know or care to know all the technical aspects of computing.  It’s that simple idea to make the technical practical. The marriage of that simple concept is what drove the creation of Apple Computers. Add to that, the brilliance of Steve Jobs who understood the importance of not only taking a stand, but finding a unique voice and flying a unique flag.  And today you have a business valued right behind Exxon, as one of the most profitable businesses in the world.

So let me ask you again, “What’s your problem, buddy?”  For me, I’ve had two lifelong problems. One, the problem that religion and churches have hijacked God and made Him unapproachable to the common man.  Twenty-one years ago, Paula and I moved to Nashville to do something about it, and we are still at it.  What is my problem?  My problem is that religion gets in the way of true spirituality. It’s a problem I think about, I study about.  It drives me every day.  After thirty-nine years, my motivation, my engine is just as revved up as it ever was.  That’s what happens when you start your engine, when you find your problem so that you can take a stand.

Oh, there’s another stand we’ve taken.  And that is, we’re going to help good people grow great marriages, raise great kids, and produce great families; families that leave a legacy.  Our goal over the next 12 years is to train, motivate, and equip one million marriages.

You ask, “Who are you to have such a goal?”  I’m a nobody.  That’s it!  That’s it!  But I’ve got a problem.  I’ve got a big problem, a problem that causes me to pray, a problem that causes me to engage more intentionally than I ever have before; a problem that caused me to create a website called, “Makingmarriagefunagain.com,” a live event called “Making Marriage Fun Again,” a weekly podcast with my wife, Paula called, “The David and Paula Show,” counseling, marrying, engaged with people every single day because I’ve got a problem.  And that is, good people lose everything in a failed marriage.  And it’s not necessary.

Oh, by the way, I have a bigger view of my problem.  When we have greater marriages, we’ll have greater kids and greater families, and we’ll have a greater country. And when there are places where broken and bruised people can gather every 7 days, be loved where they are, accepted, where they can find God simple, not church complicated, I believe the world can be changed.

So, hey buddy, what’s your problem?