Move Your Stake!

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

Fred Craddock, a teacher and preacher who has meant a great deal to me, tells a story from his boyhood in Appalachia.  One night he and his father were out in the backyard.  Fred was lying on his back looking up at the stars and his father said him, “Fred, how far can you think?”  Fred said, “I don’t know.  What do you mean?”  His father said, “Just think as far as you can think up toward the stars.”  Fred said he screwed his imagination down and said, “I’m thinking.  I’m thinking as far as I can think.”  His father said, “Well, in your mind drive down a stake out there now.  Have you driven down the stake?  That’s how far you can think?”  The boy said, “Yes, sir.”  The father said, “Now, what is on the other side of that stake?”  Fred said, “Well, there is more sky.”  His father said, “Move your stake.”  Craddock said he and his father spent the rest of the evening moving the stake farther and farther outward.

There are times like that in every life, I think, when the boundaries of imagination and thought are moved to some farther and deeper place.  You go to school, for example, and if it’s a good school, they keep telling you, “Move your stake!”  It can happen when a crisis comes to your life.  A crisis can invite you to stretch your way of thinking.  It can happen in very ordinary ways as well.  You can be by yourself or in the company of other people when you notice a stirring in yourself to expand who you are, what you seek, and what you are serving.  It’s one reason we worship. 

I believe this is the never-ending project of our lives, of our church, of Virginia Baptists.  We are here to grow.  We are here to advance in character, in love, in faith, in truth, and in service.  The sad thing is most of us live our days advancing very little, really.  Right now, imagine that you are looking up to the sky and somewhere out there driving down a stake at all you think are the limits of what you presently think.  I invite you to join me in moving our stakes and to spend the rest of our days moving them more.  We are invited to spend all our remaining days stretching our love larger, taking our thoughts higher, making our character taller, our compassions wider, our soulfulness deeper, and our purpose for living more and more expansive than just ourselves.   The love of God frees us for living that life.

What keeps us from doing all this is just about everything else.  We inhabit a culture in love with surfaces.  Ours is a shallow time that breeds shallow people, shallow standards, shallow perceptions, and shallow commitments.  There is a kind of contagion, isn’t there, in small-mindedness?  When our adversaries are shallow, we tend to react on their level.  And when our loved ones act in shallow ways, why rise above the easiness of conforming?  For the sake of ourselves, our faith, our church, our calling, let’s resist conformity.  It will only lead to the smallness of cynicism and despair, resentment and fear. 

Have you ever noticed that everything Jesus did was for someone’s enlargement?  To follow him now is in every way to be enlarged.  He makes us free from the tiny, endless orbit of guilt, the smallness of legalism, the smallness of anxiousness, the smallness of prejudice, the smallness of stuff, and even the smallness of death.

“Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or even imagine …”