Sanballat is Calling

Sanballat offered Nehemiah a "seat at the table" when he made progress in his mission (Neh 6).

It was a strategy to distract and ultimately destroy. It's a strategy that often works.

But Nehemiah said, "No, I'm doing a great work. I won't leave it and come down to you."

Not all offers are two-faced traps; some are sincere invitations to be part of something worthwhile. However, just because something falls into the general category of “worthwhile” doesn’t mean it is worthy of your specific attention.

With any offer, you have to ask, “Does this contribute to or detract from the good work I’m doing?”

After all, it's one thing to take ground; it's another to hold it. It's one thing to start a mission; it's another to finish it.

I aim to finish my mission or, more precisely, missions.

Besides simply finishing the race well as a Christian, my main mission has been to create an intergenerational, confessional community, starting first with my own family, then with East River Church, and perhaps eventually a network of like-minded churches. This overarching goal involves multiple “lesser missions” that feed into the overall mission. It will be a work that will take up all my days.

The last few years have made staying focused hard.

I've received so many offers: hundreds to speak at conferences, a couple to have my family in a reality TV show, and a never-ending stream of podcast invitations, including some of the biggest in the world. There was a time, probably a little over two years ago, when I began to let this cloud my vision. But God was faithful.

In quick succession, my brother overdosed, my mother died due to medical malpractice, and two close friends passed away: one from cancer just days after I baptized him, and the other in a motorcycle accident shortly after telling me he had entered the happiest phase of his life.

Living in a swirl of death can have a sobering effect. It did for me. Eventually.

It caused me to cancel almost all of my conference commitments, reevaluate where relational energy was being invested, and almost entirely ignore all the social media controversies. This was initially just out of exhaustion. I simply couldn’t keep up with the pace in a worn-down state with a cloud of sadness hanging over me.

Just before my mother’s botched surgery, she had called me, but I let it go to voicemail because I was on the phone with a big-name pastor. I remember looking at my call log and seeing more than a few calls from my mother in colored bright red as a missed call. It was convicting.

Now, it’s okay to let calls go to voicemail—you can call people back. But for me, that missed call metaphorically represented many missed opportunities and wrong offers accepted. As my mother lay paralyzed in her bed, unable to speak, I realized there wasn’t a person in the world I wouldn’t rudely hang up on to take a call from her. Every offer taken is another offer declined.

Let Saballet go to voicemail.