Books, Failure, and Talking Vegetables

What good book taught you a life lessons this year?

I love to read.
I love to talk about books.
I love to recommend great ones to my friends.

• Because they were such a delight to read.
• Because they were packed with fascinating (and possibly useful) information.
• Because they make me think.

One book that made me think this year is  Me, Myself and Bob: A True Story about Dreams, God and Talking Vegetables by Phil Vischer.

This is a story of a visionary who pushed the boundaries of computer animation to create cutting-edge entertainment. After years of sacrifice and hard work, Big Idea took off and enjoyed meteoric success—sending godly messages into millions of homes across America.

Then, only a few years later, came financial troubles, lawsuits and bankruptcy.

Why did it fail? Why didn’t God intervene?

That’s the real issue the book addresses: What Phil Vischer learned from his failure.

And, I must say, he learned some great lessons. Some of them apply more to entrepreneurs and small business owners, but some of his points struck home.

Here are three I found particularly relevant:

• God doesn’t kill our dreams, but he might allow them to die. Not because the dreams were wrong, but because, somewhere along the way, we took our focus off God. “You can’t fully understand that God is enough while you are clutching at your dreams. We must let our dreams go.” Sometimes God has a better plan outside those dreams. Sometimes, the very act of letting go is all that stands between us and God’s continued blessing. But we must never let our dreams become bigger than our God. And that can be very difficult, especially if our dream takes off. Which leads me to…
• God isn’t concerned with how much we impact the world. He’s concerned with us, not with all the things we do for him. He may choose to use us to impact the world, but even if he does, it’s not the results that he longs for, but our obedience to his calling. Our culture tells us that to be important we need to accomplish things and impact people’s lives in measurable ways. The reality, however, is that we will accomplish more by patiently waiting for God’s direction than by charging forward to make a difference. I admit I’m not very good at the whole “be still and know that I am God,” thing, but it certainly is freeing to know that God cares more about me than anything I can accomplish. Focusing on hearing and obeying him is a whole lot less stressful than worrying about impact. That’s his department.
• Don’t listen to the voice that whispers, “you deserve it.” Sure it’s nice to be rewarded for hard work, but if we expect to be rewarded for every little thing we do we are no better than a trained dolphin. However, this lie goes deeper—to an underlying belief that we are more deserving than others. (Unless you believe everyone else deserves exactly the same rewards, in which case you may be a communist.) Our world is filled with messages that tell us we deserve more-bigger-nicer. We might like more-bigger-nicer. We might be able to afford more-bigger-nicer. But we don’t deserve I’m not saying it is wrong to reward ourselves, or others, but the moment we start thinking we have a right to more-bigger-nicer we’re in trouble.

Has anyone else read the book? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Otherwise, I’ll say goodbye. It’s time to go find my hairbrush…