{"id":3265,"date":"2010-10-25T03:08:34","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T09:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/192.185.166.32\/~davidfoster\/?p=3265"},"modified":"2010-10-22T08:19:48","modified_gmt":"2010-10-22T14:19:48","slug":"you-can-have-32-degrees-and-still-be-freezing-and-failing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/you-can-have-32-degrees-and-still-be-freezing-and-failing\/","title":{"rendered":"You Can Have 32 Degrees and Still be Freezing and Failing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I\u2019m hearing more and more these days of excuses why people can\u2019t live the life of their dreams.\u00a0 “It\u2019s the economy.\u00a0 It\u2019s my wife.\u00a0 It\u2019s my background.”\u00a0 And one of the most expansive excuses I continually hear is, \u201cI don\u2019t have a degree.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me tell you a little story.\u00a0 With a dream and a vision of what that dream looked like, my wife Paula and I moved to Nashville 21 years ago.\u00a0 Our dream was to plant our lives in one place for the rest of our lives, in order to grow really great people through building a church.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s so unique about that?\u00a0 There are churches everywhere.\u00a0 Our dream was to build a church for people who didn\u2019t want to go to church.<\/strong> And there are a lot more people who don\u2019t want to go, than go each week.\u00a0 And you can prove that by the statistics.\u00a0 I am absolutely amazed by the number of people who don\u2019t realize that people don\u2019t accidentally not<\/em> go to church.\u00a0 They do not go for very specific reasons.<\/p>\n

So this vision to build a church for people who didn\u2019t want to go to church, for people who had given up on religion but not necessarily on God, was so big and spectacular and the need was so great, it was obvious to me there were more people like me who found religion and church-going boring, binding, and restrictive.\u00a0 And yet when we launched this amazing new church, hardly anyone showed up.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We started with a handful of people who had been here trying to start a little Baptist church.\u00a0 They\u2019d been so discouraged that when they met me, they said, \u201cIf you don\u2019t help us we\u2019re going to give up and go back to our inner-city church.”<\/p>\n

I realized that these sweet Baptist people probably wouldn\u2019t make the whole journey and I was absolutely right.\u00a0 But I knew they were good people with good hearts and could help us get started.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the challenge.\u00a0 Even with good people to help us, and a great dream, the people didn\u2019t show up by the hundreds and thousands like I had envisioned.<\/p>\n

I wondered what was wrong.\u00a0 I realized I had experience, I\u2019d grown churches before.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, every church I had served had done well.\u00a0 I had just come from East Tennessee where I had a great experience with a church called Towering Oaks Baptist Church.\u00a0 But it seemed in this new town, this town of creativity and spontaneity, of energy and enthusiasm, I was like a pariah. You know what my problem was? Well, that\u2019s for another day and another post.\u00a0 But let me tell you what my problem wasn\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t for lack of degrees<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I have degrees.\u00a0 I love my degrees.\u00a0 I spent a lot of money on my degrees.\u00a0 I love the schools I have my degrees from.\u00a0 But the truth of the matter is, no one was impressed with my degrees.<\/strong> No one was impressed with my dissertation because it was on the shelves of a seminary in Jackson, Mississippi.\u00a0 And even if it were bound and distributed no one would read it because it was, after all, an academic work that no one really cared about, except the people who required it to give me, yes, my degree.<\/p>\n

Now the story is basically this.\u00a0 The church of our dreams was created and realized; one of the happiest times of my life.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t because I had degrees.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, that I had degrees when nothing was happening was more discouraging than if I didn\u2019t have degrees.\u00a0 But I am absolutely sure that if I didn\u2019t have degrees I would have laid the blame of the slow growth of the realization of my dream on the fact that I didn\u2019t have degrees. <\/strong> So you\u2019re screwed either way, right?\u00a0 You either have degrees and nothing happens (which is embarrassing) or you don\u2019t have degrees and nothing happens (which is discouraging).<\/p>\n

So let me just set you free.\u00a0 You don\u2019t need to put yourself into mind-numbing debt in order to go get a degree. <\/strong> Do the work.\u00a0 Know what you\u2019re doing, do the work, do it with passion, do it with excellence, do it over time, don\u2019t give up because nothing happens fast.\u00a0 There is no short-cut to any place you want to go and is worth going once you get there.\u00a0 Just do the work.<\/strong> Do the work, do the work, do the work, do the work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m hearing more and more these days of excuses why people can\u2019t live the life of their dreams.\u00a0 “It\u2019s the economy.\u00a0 It\u2019s my wife.\u00a0 It\u2019s my background.”\u00a0 And one of the most expansive excuses I continually hear is, \u201cI don\u2019t have a degree.\u201d Let me tell you a little story.\u00a0 With a dream and a … Continue reading “You Can Have 32 Degrees and Still be Freezing and Failing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"series":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3265"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=3265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}