The One Thing

"The One Thing"
Job 19:13-22

Do you remember the movie, “City Slickers”?  Billy Crystal plays Mitch.  Mitch works for an ad agency in a big city.  He’s getting burned out.  His marriage has gone dry.  He’s having a mid-life crisis.  He doesn’t know who he is and what his life is about.  He needs to figure that out.

So he convinces two of his friends to go with him to New Mexico to a dude ranch for two weeks where they will be working a real cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado.  Jack Palance plays the real cowboy, Curly, who will lead the cattle drive.  Curly teaches these three friends a few lessons.  Here’s one of them.

(Show scene from movie, “City Slickers” where Curly talks about “the one thing” to Mitch:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1uOqRb0HU).  Michelle had to edit out a word in Curly’s statement.

This idea of “one thing” comes up in a lot of places.  In Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People there’s a chapter titled, “First Things First.”  In that chapter, Covey says we need to answer this question:  What one thing could you keep in front of you, that if you kept it in front of you on a regular basis would make a huge positive difference in your personal life?

In an interview with Gary Keller, real estate entrepreneur and author, he talked about the ONE thing, saying:
What you’re trying to do is set up a domino run in your life. You want to line things up with the end in mind…Your ONE Thing is always tied to your destination. At any given moment it is your most levered action – your first domino – that starts it all and gets you the most bang for your buck. We can’t do everything, but we can do ONE Thing that matters most at any given moment in time.

Gary Keller said, later in that same interview, “Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.”  In other words, you can’t have five ONE things.  You can be a multi-tasker in terms of all your activity and work, but you can’t be a multi-ONE thinger.  Having more than ONE thing just divides who you are and what you become.

Finding the “one thing” isn’t like finding your career, or even doing the one thing you were meant to do in life.  Instead, it’s like that one stone thrown in the water that sends out it’s ripple effects into every area of your life.  The ONE thing isn’t the ripples.  It’s the rock that created the ripples.  It’s like Gary Keller says in the interview above—that one domino, that first domino, that puts everything else in motion.

The German politician, poet and writer, Goethe, once said, “Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”  That’s what happens if we have too many ONE things.  Those which we thought were ultimately important, aren’t.  In the toss and twirl of life they are the things that don’t really matter.  But we try to force them into primary positions, and they end up forcing us into major distractions away from our ONE thing.

According to quantum physics, everything is always in motion. That means we can’t have balance.  There may be no such thing as a state of equilibrium.  Everything about physical life, down to every atom, is full of constant motion.  How often have you found yourself saying or thinking, “Everything seems out of balance.” Or, I just need to stop; I don’t want to move another inch.”  Notice, we say things like that as if it’s a problem, as if balance is something we should have. Maybe there is no balance.  There is no stillness.  What if that’s true?  If it is true, then there has to be something, the ONE thing, to keep you focused when all about you and inside of you is flux, flow and motion.

This constant, awful flux, is what Job’s ONE thing was found in.  It’s the one thing he held on to when everything was changing.  His sheep and servants were killed by violent lightening strikes.  His oxen were stolen by the dreaded Sabeans.  The Chaldeans came and stole all his camels, killing even more servants.  And the crowning blow was finding out, that while having a feast, all his adult children were crushed when a windstorm blew and the building they were feasting in collapsed.

If that wasn’t enough, Job came down with some kind of skin disease and he became covered with pus oozing boils.  That’s the Job testimony that quantum physics is right.  Everything is moving and changing every moment, and there is no way to maintain your balance in life.  It is out of that life experience that Job comes back again and again to his ONE thing that he can hold on to in the midst of the constant, tragic motion in his life.

His wife tells him to curse God and let go.  Just die.  But Job is holding on to that ONE thing that even his wife doesn’t understand.  If his life is going to end, he wants it said of him that he had that ONE thing that kept him throughout his life.

Take out the blank piece of paper from your bulletin.  I’m going to run you through an imaging exercise that I’ve adapted from the chapter, “Begin With The End In Mind” in the book  7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Imagine. You come to church.  You walk into the sanctuary.  You realize a funeral is going on.  People you know are there.  Church friends.  Community friends.  Work friends.  Family.  You walk down the aisle and up to the casket.  You look inside and it’s you.  This is your funeral.

Several people are standing up to talk about you.  In their comments about you they are each answering one question:  “What do they think your ‘ONE thing’ was?”  Put four names across the top of your paper.  Here are the names I want you to put up there.  Think of a family member first (spouse, sister, brother, mother, father, son or daughter).  Put their name to the far left of your sheet.  Next one of your close friends.  Then someone from your work.  And the fourth is someone from here at church.  Under each of thesse four names write what you think they would say is your ONE thing.  Take a couple of minutes to do that.

If you have a lot of courage, you might write down your answers, then go and personally ask each of those people, whose name you wrote at the top of your paper, this question.  The answers may tell you more than you want to know.  You may find out that what you believed to be your “ONE thing” is not what others are perceiving at all.

What is the “ONE thing”?  It’s the inner guidance system at the heart of who you are.  Maybe one way to think about it is by starting with the very moment of the end of your life, as we just did in the exercise.  Your ONE thing becomes that which everything about you and your past is examined.  This ONE thing will also be the measure and your definition of success.  At the end of life, it will be asked, Was she or he a success?  That can only be measured by your “ONE thing.”

Bret Graber had an idea for a table.  He built the table with no plans except for the vision he had in his head.  And he built it.  Here’s the picture of Brett sitting at his table.  All he used was a saw and a hammer.  No mitre box.  No level.  No measuring tape.  Certainly, no Pintrest, Nick Squires.  Just his vision.

This is how the “one thing” works.  It’s the all-powerful idea around which everything else in life is created and built.  You have to have the idea—the ONE thing first.  Then you start putting your life together based on that one thing.  At the end of your life, you finally sit at the table you created.  You get the ONE thing in mind, first!  Then you build your life.  Not the other way around.

Job was coming to that table he had built.  He had no reason to think that he wouldn’t be the next victim of circumstance and his life would be over.  So, early on in his conversation with his “friends” he lets them know what his ONE thing has been:

I know that my Savior lives,
and at the end
he will stand on this earth.
My flesh may be destroyed,
yet from this body
I will see God.
Yes, I will see him for myself,
and I long for that moment. (19:23-27)

Job’s ONE thing was knowing that his Savior God lives.  That he would be seeing that Savior God.  But not just seeing God.  Most people, when they think of “meeting their maker” are terrified by the thought of that experience—watching all the bad stuff of your life being shown to you by God like an awful movie.  But not Job.  Job not only will see God, but Job is looking forward to it.  He lives, standing on tip toe, if you will, of that face-to-face experience with God.

Around that ONE thing, Job has built his life.  Everything about who he was as a person, everything about what he did with his life, had as its ONE foundation, the great expectation of seeing God he knew was there. No matter what happened to him in life—and a lot of awful things did happen, he still didn’t let all that effect his ONE thing:  Knowing his Savior God, and expectantly awaiting to see God for himself.  That’s why, at the start of this book, God is so enamored with Job, bragging about Job to the heavenly court.  “Have you noticed Job?  Here’s a guy who’s got his ONE thing right—he considers me in everything he does.”

“Have you noticed __________________?” God might be saying about you.  What is your ONE thing, that has been the ruler that measures all of your life, the rock that has caused all the ripples emanating out from who you are, the idea that moved you to find the lumber to build something of yourself, that has made God stand up and take notice?  What is your ONE thing?