Thumbing through an old copy of the Atlantic (June 2003) I read a report citing a study by the research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas saying that the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament cost the U.S. economy 1.4 billion a year in wasted time at work. I’m sure that four years later the cost has risen. If the average American worker spends 10 minutes a day over the three weeks of the tournament talking about the tournament, filling out brackets, placing bets, painting themselves Gator Blue (no one spent a lot of time painting themselves Duke-blue this year), or singing “Hang On Sloopy,” the time adds up.
1.4 billion dollars may not seem like much nowadays – one person’s student loan bill, a house in Old Town Alexandria, Two Grande Chai Lattes at the BWI Starbucks – but to Paraphrase Senator Fulbright forty years ago: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” It adds up.
We all know about the miracle of compound interest. We are learning about the creative rate tables of non-traditional mortgages. It adds up.
One of my favorite jokes from sixth grade: Two guys own a shirt factory. One guy says to the other one,” Hey, we’re running a new promotion where we’re selling every shirt in stock for 1$ below cost.” The other guy says, “But how will we make any money?” “Volume!” the other guy says. It adds up, or subtracts down – the numbers continue to accumulate.
Every year we hear Jerris Bullard report the year end numbers of baptisms from India – 112,000 baptized, 147,000 baptized, 213,000 baptized, 256,000 baptized. These numbers sound Biblical. But when 12,000 preachers are preaching two to three times a day, and baptize 2 or 3 at each meeting the numbers add up.
What would happen if, each day, we prayed for five people who need the Lord? What if we spent just one minute a day praying for each of them? What if we spoke to just one of them a week about something relating to faith – you know, just to remind them that we are people of faith? What if once a month – only once a month – we took that conversation beyond the merely significant, and got specific about our faith? What would happen then? What if half of us brought one person to faith each year, and half of those lived and worked with us? We would add at least fifty to our number the first year alone. Year after year that number would compound.
But of course, now we are not talking about numbers but about souls.
What if each week we deliberately said one kind thing,
Or did one kind deed?
What if each week we really studied one (even one very short) passage of scripture - one parable, one psalm, or one proverb?
What if, instead of each week, we did these things each day?
What would that add up to?
We know about great oaks from little acorns, and a pearl from a single grain of sand. But do we believe?
Hopefully we will believe Jesus when he tells us about how things add up:
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard sees which a man took and sowed in his field; this is smaller than all the other seeds, but when it is full grown it is larger than any other plant in the garden, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches…The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and worked into three pecks of meal until it was all leavened. Matthew 13.31-33