Building Below the Water Line

Editor’s note: Each month, Gordon MacDonald shares from his journals his recent reflections on his reading, preaching, travels, and life.

Picked up in a Vermont “used book” store: David McCullough’s The Great Bridge (Simon and Schuster, 1972). As usual McCullough (among the best of modern writers) tells a great story, this time of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which arched the East River and joined Manhattan to Brooklyn.

In June 1872, the Chief Engineer of the project wrote: “To such of the general public as might imagine that no work had been done on the New York tower, because they see no evidence of it above the water, I should simply remark that the amount of the masonry and concrete laid on that foundation during the past winter, under water, is equal in quantity to the entire masonry of the Brooklyn tower visible today above the water line” (italics mine).

The Brooklyn Bridge remains a major transportation artery in New York City today because, 135 years ago, the Chief Engineer and his construction team did their most patient and daring work where no one could see it: on the foundations of the towers below the water line. It is one more illustration of an ageless principle in leadership: the work done below the water line (in a leader’s soul) that determines whether he or she will stand the test of time and challenge. This work is called worship, devotion, spiritual discipline. It’s done in quiet, where no one but God sees.

Today there is a tremendous emphasis on leadership themes such as vision, organizational strategy, and the “market-sensitivity” of one’s message. And it’s all great stuff (stuff I wish I’d heard when I was real young). But if it is all about what’s above the water line, we are likely to witness a leadership crash of sorts in the coming years. Leaders blessed with great natural skills and charisma may be vulnerable to collapse in their character, their key relationships, their center of belief because they never learned that you cannot (or should not anyway) build above the water line until there is a substantial foundation below it. A re-read of the life of Moses (which I’ve just done) is the best example of this. The man spent 80 years preparing for his more visible work.

My opinion: the test of a leader is less what he or she accomplishes before 45 years of age and more what happens after. Call it sustainability! The trick is to last and grow stronger, wiser, more focused with the years.

These thoughts stimulated from reading about an old bridge.

More used books: The religion section of the same store yielded a copy of Joan Chittister’s Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope (Eerdmans, 2003), a much newer book and full of rich insight. Sister Chittister, no stranger to tough struggles in her life, writes, “The great secret of life is how to survive struggle without succumbing to it, how to bear struggle without being defeated by it, how to come out of great struggle better than when we found ourselves in the midst of it.” No whining or complaining in this book, rather a “blunt-facts” view of life and where one discovers the grace of God in the midst of it.

From my journal: I am regularly amused by the unanticipated connections of events in one’s life. On Saturday I picked Gail (my wife) up at the airport. When we got into the car she wanted to read to me from a book she’d been going through on the airplane. It had sat on her desk for a year, unread. She walked me through the story of a woman who had been in prison for six years, converted to Christ during that time, and—when released—helped found the Angel Tree Project which is so much a part of Prison Fellowship’s ministry.

When Gail finished I said, “I’d like to use that for the ending of my sermon tomorrow.” It’s just what I’ve been looking for as a “closer.”

The next morning I read what Gail had given me the night before. The congregation listened intently. But there were three women near the front on the right who clearly listened more than anyone else. In fact, I noted that all three were weeping when I finished. Then after the benediction, I learned why.

They had all been released from prison that week and were in a local half-way house, and this was their first time in church. And what had God prepared for them to hear? A word of hope about someone just like themselves who had entered into the redeemed way and made a difference in her world.

Why does a book lay on a desk unread for a year? Why does a specific story come to one’s attention 24 hours before it becomes useful? And why do three women pick that particular day to come to worship to hear that story from that book? I’ve given up trying to figure out all the answers and become more satisfied with consigning some things to the glorious mysteries of God.

Rediscovery: Before you count old folks out, brood on this: “They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green, proclaiming, ‘The Lord is upright; he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him'” (Psalm 92:14-15). There are people like that in almost every congregation, waiting to be rediscovered.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is also chair of World Relief and editor at large of Leadership.

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