>> DAVID NASSER: I know that many of you have
been greatly impacted by our honored guest today. I know that his writing, whether it's the
very first book- that really, it wasn't the first book he came out with, but it was the
real first book that really became a New York Times best selling book, Blue Like Jazz- or
it was more his latest book that we we're going to have available here, by the way,
for you, Scary Close. I know that if you book end that, and all
the books in-between, that many of you have been impacted by Donald's writing. You have been impacted by his teaching, from
storyline conferences down to other things. He's also on the Presidential Task Force,
and so he's involved in even just governance in this country. Just a very high-level leader who's just decided
today to come and invest into us. I don't know about you, but I feel indebted
to the ministry of this man. I feel indebted to the writings of this man
personally, because I've seen the effect of it in my own life. It's made me, hopefully, a better dad, hopefully
a better husband, just a better pastor. Anybody else just been impacted by Donald's
writing and teaching? Can you just wave? Donald look around you. A lot of these people just are grateful that
you're here. Can we just put our hands together? Come on spread the love for the great Donald
Miller. Come on up. >> DONALD MILLER: I appreciate that. Wow, that was awesome! You guys, I grew up Southern Baptist, and
the worship is better now. You guys don't remember the day. When I was a kid, I mean it was so bad. (Singing) “I have decided, I'm so excited,
to follow Jesus. Couldn't be more excited to.” It was really bad, and it's a lot better now. Well, I'll tell you what I've been doing the
last few years. I've been studying stories. For about 10 years I've been studying how
story structure works, I just got fascinated by it. It's so fun to study it and I did that for
a couple reasons. One, just to get started, just to be a better
writer, right? To write better books, and then got to work
on a screenplay. Then discovered that story structure really
parallels life in so many ways, and began to think about life as a story, and so wrote
about that, and started helping people live a better story. But the problem with studying story structure
is, and this is a little caveat, I'm going to ruin movies for you today. I'm going to tell you how they work. I know, I'm so sorry, but I'm going to do
it. Stories are very formulaic, they're so formulaic,
and if you know them. You know? So my wife hates going to movies with me,
because she knows at some point I'm going to elbow her, and I'm going to point at the
screen and say that guy dies in 31 minutes, and he does. He does. I'll tell you how Star Wars ends right now. Hold your- no, I'm not going to do it. Anyway, I love stories and I've discovered
though as I just study stories that there are really four major roles in most stories
that you go see at the movie. Four major roles, and in my opinion I think
they're the four roles that we often play in life, right? There's the victim, the victim, then there's
the villain. Then, there's the hero and then there's one
we don't think about very often; but I think it's actually the most important role, and
it's the role of guide. If you think about it, you and I often play
the victim, the villain, the hero, and the guide not only in our life, but in a given
day- depending on whether or not you've eaten lunch, right? I want to talk a little bit about what roles
these are, because it's important. Because I think a lot of us, especially at
this age, we're wondering what role am I going to play in my life. I mean what role do I wake up and say, this
is my identity; this is who I am. This is where I fit on the planet. This is how I'm going to impact the planet,
and we have a conscious decision to make. Am I going to be the victim today? Am I going to be the villain? Will I play the role of hero? Or will I be the guide? And so I want to unpack a little bit of what
these four roles do. The victim, the victim, if you identify yourself
as a victim, the dominant thing the victim is looking for is for someone to rescue them,
right? That's what the dominant need for a victim
is. They need to be rescued, and so if we're waking
up every day and we're saying, man, I wish somebody would just come along and rescue
me, then we are self identifying- maybe without even knowing it; we're self identifying as
the victim. And then there's the villain, and we all know
the villain's the bad guy. The villain wakes up every day, and normally
what the villain is trying to do is seek vengeance. The villain has usually been hurt in some
way, and they're out to get even with whoever hurt them; and so if we wake up one morning
we say “I’m going to get so-and-so because they talked behind my back.” We have to be really careful. Have you ever done that? I'm going to get so-and-so because they talked
behind my back. You ever done that? You ever felt that? Raise your hand. Nobody? This is a really good group of awesome Christians. Yeah we have, right? And we have to be careful because if we step
into that too far, we're stepping into the role of villain in our life. There's the victim, the villain, then there's
the hero and the hero is doing what? Well the hero is trying to save somebody who's
a victim. They're trying to rescue somebody. They're getting up every day, and they're
doing work that tries to, as the Bible would say in describing the life of Joseph, trying
to save many lives. Then there's the guide, and this character
is fascinating, I'll get to him at the end of this talk. But the guide is giving up their lives to
try to help heroes win the day. You know as I look at these roles it becomes
more and more important to me the older I get, because what I want in my life is really
to live a life of meaning- exceptional meaning. I think we all know when we go to a movie,
and you see a really good movie. You know what the sign to me that I saw a
really good movie is? It's this; it’s after the movie is over
everybody just kind of sits in the theater for another few minutes and lets the credits
roll, right? You ever been to a movie where nobody really
gets up? The credits start rolling. If it's an okay movie as soon as it's over
you're up, but if it's one of those movies that really hits you. Think about the last movie you saw that really
hit you like that. I think about movies like The King's Speech. I think about movies like Inside Out. Did you see Pixar's Inside Out? Wasn't it great? Didn't you just want to sit there for another
couple of minutes? It's almost like, if I had to name the emotion
that's going on in my heart at the end of a really great movie like that- if I had to
name the emotion- it's going to surprise you, but I think this is the emotion: its gratitude. I feel a sense of gratitude, and it's not
necessarily a sense of gratitude for the actors who were in the movies, or the screenwriters,
or the directors, although I'm grateful for them. What I actually sense after a really great
story is told to me, I have a sense of gratitude that I'm grateful to be alive. And the reason I'm grateful to be alive is
because the story that I've just encountered has shown me that life can, in fact, be better,
deeper, more meaningful, and more beautiful than I thought. It was like a little wake-up call of this
thing they we're experiencing is really more beautiful than we've considered, and this
story, if only for 10 or 15 minutes, made me go I want to tap into that. Here's why I bring that up. Here's why, because you are at the beginning
of act two of your life. You are moving into decisions about what you
are going to do with your life, and in fact, you are moving into decisions about who you
are going to be in your life, what role you are going to play. And here's what I want for you, and it's kind
of cryptic, but I'm going to say it anyway. I want for you someday in the future, and
this moment will happen, I want for your funeral to be a bunch of people sitting around listening
to the story of your life, and I want them to sit there for an extra five minutes after
your funeral, and I want them to feel grateful. Because you and what you did showed them that
life could be more meaningful and more beautiful than they thought. That, to me is a really good aim, I really
good obligatory or climactic scene to head toward. That we would live in such a way that our
story would inspire the world and give people pause and say, I think a human being can do
more than we considered at first. What a beautiful story that would be and in
order to get there, because we have decisions in this process, I think we should consider
these four roles. I want to look first at victim, and when we
hear the word victim, we know there are real victims in the world. The Syrian refugee crisis, all that you're
learning about on campus this week- people who are in situations so dire and so grave,
whose wounds are so open, and bleeding, and painful, that they simply need and must have
help. I also think there is a temptation for some
of us to self-identify as victims when we are in fact not victims. Henry Cloud defines victims in this way. He says people with no way out. I mean a real, true victim is somebody who
has no other possibility. So this removes a lot of the stuff that you
and I deal with on a day-to-day basis. Like when you get to the cafeteria and they're
out of banana pudding, you're not actually a victim. Some of you are going, no, no, no, no. You've never had the banana pudding, it's
so good. No, right? And we are so tempted to play this victim,
but I want to be really careful in identifying this role, and I want to point out some of
the landmines in it for us. First of all, every human being, every one
of you, is born a legitimate victim; there's nothing that you can do. You don't come out of the womb and say I need
to get a job, right? I mean your parents may have said that to
you, but you didn't think that. Yeah, we're legitimate. We need someone to take care of us. We need someone to hold us. We need someone to feed us. We need the love and the nurture, and God
has designed this system where you and I get born helpless. It's a really humbling kind of system, but
as we get older we begin to grow from victim into something else, and hopefully it's a
heroic role. We'll go there in a second. I remember a point in my life- I don't know
why this memory has never left me, but I think it was that stage where you're moving from
kind of self-identifying as a victim to self-identifying as somebody who God has given agency to. I grew up in a single-parent home. My dad split when I was a kid, and my mom
didn't have very much money and we used to go to- it was a big treat in my house, growing
up in Houston, Texas-- I know, awesome- to go to a place called Mr. Charburger. And it was as bad as it sounds, but we liked
it. And I remember one day I'm playing around
on a picnic table at Mr. Charburger, and we're getting to eat Mr. Charburger, and I fall
off this picnic table. It was a concrete picnic table, and I just
scrape up my knee. So, you know, basic childhood kind of injury. I've scraped my knee, and I'm crying, and
I've basically ruined the family moment at Mr. Charburger. Mom puts me in the backseat. My sister's in the front seat. We're driving, and I'll never forget this. My mother looked in the rear-view mirror at
me crying. I'm like six or seven years old. She looks at me in the rear-view mirror and
she says, "Don, can you hold on for just one second?" And so I stopped crying. I'm like, "wah...!" And she said, "Crying is not going to make
the pain go away." And I just remember thinking she's got a really
good point there, right? She's got a really good point. I think there's a temptation for some of us
to get into this victim's spiral, and if you think about being in the victim's spiral,
think about how much it offers you. If offers you a lot of attention, right? It offers you an excuse not to try, because
if I grew up a victim then I have all sorts of excuses to not go to class today, or not
persevere, because look at this hard thing that I've been handed. This a deadly place to live inside of a story,
and there are a couple reasons for that. In story structure, if you're writing a screenplay,
there's something really fascinating that happens. The hero in the story changes. They experience a character transformation. At the beginning of the story they're ill-equipped;
they’re full of doubt. At the end of the story they're equipped;
they're confident. They're making things happen. What's fascinating about the victim character
in a story is they do not change. There is no transformation for a victim. Which is so important for us to remember,
that if we are truly victims the calling is not to stay as a victim but to move out of
that identity into something else. We have to transform. God designed every living thing to get stronger
until it dies. To change, to be different, to be a different
person tomorrow than we are today. We must transform. We are designed to transform and what this
means is, as you leave your high school, and you leave your home, and all those people
back home thought of you as kind of a lazy person or a loser or whatever, guess what? You get to change, so that by the time you
graduate from Liberty you are not the person that you used to be. We are transformed, made new. Every living and healthy thing changes, and
if you want to stunt your growth self-identify as a victim. I love what Jesus calls us. He calls us conquerors. Jesus is not the one that sits us down and
says, oh you are a victim. He says you are a conqueror, you are a champion,
he names us. He speaks an identity into us that is, in
fact, stronger than who we are at the moment so that we can become something different. And I'll tell you, a lot of you guys, probably
one of the reasons I'm here is I'm like one of Liberty's token liberals to speak at chapel. But I've got to tell you, as hopefully I see
things in a balanced perspective, but one of the things that bothers me in a political
cycle are politicians that tempt us to play the role of victim. I don't think we are victims. I don't think. You know there was two articles, one in the
Washington Post I think the other was in the New York Times, just this past year that says
the next generations of Americans, the next generations of American, no longer believe
in the American dream. For the first time in American history we
no longer believe that we can become better, in fact, than our parents, and I think when
I look at that I think, oh no. The identity of an American is being tempted
by victimhood when in fact we don't have to be victims. But who do we become? Well, we take the next step. We become heroes, and heroes are not this
glamorous role that you're not thinking right now. Because you're probably going, Don, I don't
want to self-identify as a hero. That's very self-obsessed and narcissistic,
but actually when you look at what a hero is in a story you'll be fascinated. Heroes are not these strong, capable characters. In fact, you would never write a hero like
that. A hero at the beginning of a story is insecure,
broken, ill-equipped, and filled with self-doubt. Raise your hand if that's you. Great! You've got what it takes to be a hero. It's always like that at the beginning. I mean you step on campus and you just go,
I don't think I have what it takes to do this. If you thought that when you stepped on campus
you have what it takes to be a hero, right? Because they never think they're going to
get the thing done, and they're always broken. They're always hurting, filled with self-doubt. In fact, the hero and the villain, fascinatingly,
have a similar backstory. If you see villains in movies, almost always-
a little trick out of the bag here- almost always the villain has some kind of physical
deformity. There's a scar on their face; there's a lisp,
there's a limp. There's something going on with the hero that
is physical, and the reason that screenwriters put that into the story is they wanted you
to know this villain has a backstory in which they got hurt. I don't even need to explain to you what it
is, but they got hurt. And they only difference- this is also true
of the hero, there's a crippling effect to the hero. The only difference between the hero and the
villain is how they responded to that pain. The villain got hurt and their response to
the pain was I'm going to get the world back for what it did to me. And the hero responds and says, “Ow that
hurt.” I'm going to stop anybody else from having
to experience that. That’s the difference between a villain
and a hero, and that's why I think God calls us to be heroes. Not to escape pain or experience no comfort. That's not the idea here. There are incredible challenges to the hero. The hero wakes up every day and faces enormous
amounts of challenge, and pain, and things they have to overcome. You know there's been this wrestling in the
identity of the average evangelical that says if we have Christ on earth than life will
be great and life will be easy. The problem is I don't see that anywhere in
the scriptures. I mean really what that is it’s a mechanism
for selling products. If you buy Propecia you won't go bald, everything
will be great. If you buy Jesus everything will be great. There's nothing biblical about that. Can you imagine the apostle Paul doing an
infomercial for the product of Jesus? You know like you're flipping through channels
late at night and you come across, "Hey I'm Paul, and I used to have a job, and money,
and lots of power. If I didn't like you I could kill you. I had great friends. Then I called this toll-free number 1-800-JESUS
and I got Jesus! And now I don't have a job. I don't have any friends; people don't like
me. I'm routinely imprisoned and bitten by snakes. You too can have the product of Jesus if you
just call 1-800..." It's not much of a sales pitch there, right? So we know from this that what Jesus is calling
to is not a life of comfort and ease, but a story that transforms us. And stories that transform us require pain. They are difficult. If you're writing a screenplay, and you have
a character that transforms without having to go through pain you will lose the audience,
because joy changes nobody. Joy happens when the challenge has been gotten
through, and it’s the transitional space between one change and another. And please don't mistake; it's awesome, but
it's right back into the pit, right back into the challenge. And here's the thing that we have to remember. We don't get to be spectators to life. You are in the story, you are playing a role
whether you want to or not. We are either the victim, the villain, the
hero, or the guide. The hero wakes up every day and says God needs
me to save many lives and get off my butt and get to work, and yes it's going to be
hard. It was never promised to be easy, and I don't
want it any other way because one, I want to transform, and two, I want to live a great
story and that requires challenges and hardship and my attitude about that is bring it on. That is how we transform. That is how we live the beautiful story. You know I have this friend named Josh Shipp,
and I don't know if Josh has spoken here or not, but Josh is an amazing guy. He had a show on MTV for a while now, he has
a show, I think with The Rock. He has a show on television with The Rock,
which is cool. I was busy. And Josh is kind of a speaker to youth all
over the world, and he helps them deal with some hard issues. Josh and I got to know each other, and when
we were getting to know each other Josh told me his story and Josh grew up in 26 foster
homes. 26 different families Josh grew up in. And I said to him once, I don't want to ask
too much here, but how did you become you, growing up in 26 foster homes? Because he's one of the most healthy, well-adjusted
people I know. He's truly on a heroic journey. And Josh said, "You know it was about my fourth
foster home, and the father in this house, something happened at school, and it was hard,
and I was feeling sorry for myself. And He said to me, 'Josh, I want to tell you
something, and I want you to listen really carefully, because if you understand it your
life is going to go ok.'" And he said, "What is it?" When things like this happen you have a choice. You can either become bitter, or you can get
better." That's it, and to me, this is the choice of
whether we will be a victim or a hero. Remember, hero isn't this grandiose, narcissistic
beautiful thing. Heroes are troubled just like victims are,
but they're doing something about it. I think there's going to be a wrestling while
you’re here on campus for your identity. I think there's going to be enormous amounts
of temptation for you to self-identify as a victim, and I would challenge you; don't
take the bait. Identify as a hero. I remember when there was another sort of
fork in the road in my life. Wrote some books, had some success, and really
felt like God was saying to me, Don I want you to write a book to young men who've grown
up without father figures, and I thought, man. I could do that, you know? I've made it. I can do that, I can help people stay out
of the land mines. So I went off to Orcas Island in the San Juan
off the coast of Washington state. Beautiful place. In the winter, nobody is on Orcas Island. And I thought, I'm going to rent a cabin up
here by myself and really process my life, and try to write a book for people who've
grown up without dads. So I go up there, and let me just tell you. If you're going to process your father wounds
don't go to an abandoned island in the winter. There's still sea otters that flee when they
see me. They're like, "We don't want to hear about
your dad," and they splash themselves into the water. I'm in a painful, hard time, because I got
up there and I realized, wait, I haven't made it at all. I've got all sorts of issues that I've got
to work through. I've got to go see a counselor about this
stuff. And the more I study issues of fatherlessness,
the more I realized I'm not a champion of this. I'm still in the midst of it. And the victim cycle started to spin in my
brain. Oh Don. Woe is you. No wonder you didn't make good enough grades. No wonder you're struggling in your business. No wonder this, because you grew up without
a dad. And all those excuses started spiraling around,
and I took a break, went back to Portland for a couple weeks, and I started reading
a book, just to get my mind off the stuff that I was doing, called Country of my Skull. And this book is about the formation the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. So post-apartheid, Nelson Mandela put a committee
together to try to heal the country, and he handed this committee to a man named Bishop
Desmond Tutu. And Bishop Desmond Tutu was amazing; I mean
he's such a bright, cheerful, wonderful human being. His words are so charismatic and powerful,
such an amazing believer, and he was asked at a press conference, which is recorded in
this book, "Bishop Tutu, what sort of person do you want to serve on the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa? What sort of person can heal this country?” And Bishop Tutu said this, he said, "I want
victims. Victims will serve on the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission." Those who have been raped, those who have
watched their parents killed. These are the people I want on the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. However," he said, and he added this, “However,
they cannot have stayed victims. They must have forgiven their oppressors." Can you imagine? And then he named these people. He said these will be the wounded healers
of our country. I want you to think about some of the hardest
things that have ever happened to you. Think about them. And think about the temptation to let those
hard things take you down and drown you in a sea of sorrow. And then I want you to imagine the hand of
Jesus picking you up, holding you, and saying to the evil one, "This is what you did with
my son. This is what you did with my daughter. Now watch what I do." I think about Christine Caine. I was just with Christine a couple weeks ago. Her first visit to Tennessee she spoke at
a dinner at the governor's mansion, which is just, the governor and I are next-door
neighbors in Tennessee. It's such a weird thing being in the south,
because you call the governor. "Do you want to come over for dinner?" And he comes. That doesn't happen very often. But Christine Caine was there, and she's sharing
her story of abuse and her background, and what she's doing with it. It had given her the gift of empathy. Because of the abuse in her background, she
was able to know, one, that people were abused, and two that are hurt very badly, and three,
that she was going to accept the heroic role of trying to do something about it. At God just plucked her up and said, this
is what Satan did, but watch what I do. Watch how many hundreds of thousands of women
will be rescued from this because of my touch on her life, transforming her from a victim
to a hero. This is the identity Christ wants us to have. To take our pain and wear it as a badge. So I read that book, went back, finished my
own book, got some amazing opportunities to start an organization called the mentoring
project which trains men in churches to mentor fatherless boys. From there I got to serve on a presidential
task-force, helped get some legislation passed that reunites men coming out of prison with
their children to give them an identity other than that of criminal, hopefully saving taxpayers
hundreds of millions of dollars. And you would say to me, "Don, I'm so sad
you grew up without a dad. Was that hard?” I don't remember. I don't remember. I feel like I won the lottery for crying out
loud. But if I wouldn't have grown up without a
dad I wouldn't have been able to work in the White House, I wouldn't have been able to
accomplish all this stuff. It just feels like a joyful thing to me. What a beautiful thing that God can actually
take your wound and make something really gorgeous out of it. Something that gives you the authority to
speak into a broken world. One thing that heroes do that victims cannot
do, and villains certainly don't do, is they take responsibility to the life that's been
given them. I mean I'm tempted with victimhood all the
time, right? You just want to go, oh well, it’s not my
fault. I have a company back home. We have about 10 employees, and we have core
value in our for-profit company. What we do is we help billion dollar brands
sell you more stuff. Thank you. I mean you're welcome. That's what we do, but our core values are
spelled out really clearly for our company, and one of the core values for our company
is we do not self-identify as victims. We don't do it. And the surest way to get yourself out of
our company is to make excuses or self-identify as a victim. Why? Because it kills whatever culture you're in. It will crush it. We just don't self-identify as victims. I want to look also at the villain. There's this choice when something really
hard happens to us, and when we we're processing the pain of our pasts, are we going to become
the hero, or are we going to become the villain? And the villain of course gets bitter. The villain also does not change. They're the same at the beginning as the are
at the end. They're sort of shallow characters. Villains are incapable of learning, for instance,
from their mistakes. They justify their mistakes. A villain always has to be right. A villain can't process, “oh, I made a mistake.” They always have to spin it in such a way
that they're right. Some of you are thinking right now: my roommate
is a villain. It could be. There's actually not that many of them. Villains, by the way, have no friends and
no equals, only minions, only minions, cute little minions. Villains can't be vulnerable. They can't share their weaknesses with other
people. They always need to be perceived as strong. And remember there's some sympathy here, because
villains have been hurt, and they've made a vow with the world I will never be hurt
again. The hero's vow is I'm going to stop other
people from being hurt. The villain's vow is I'll never be hurt again. It's still a narcissistic view of life. Well, finally I want to close with what I
think is the role we all want to head toward. And we have to play the role of hero well
in order to earn the role of guide. And the guide is somebody who has already
played the heroic role in their life, and they're transitioning so now they're going
to start giving their life away. Every hero is looking for a guide. Luke Skywalker, he's given this incredible,
difficult challenge of destroying the Death Star. He's wondering if he has what it takes to
become a jedi. He doesn't know if he can do it, and so storytellers
for centuries have been putting another role into the story: the role of guide. So when Luke Skywalker doesn't know if he
can do it, who steps into his life? Yoda, or Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? When Katniss, in Hunger Games, - anybody ever
read Hunger Games? -Very bad Southern Baptists! Feel guilty. Feel guilty. When Katniss doesn't know if she can do it,
who steps into her life? Yeah, Woody, from Cheers. The guide character steps in. And the guide is this fascinating character. They're the ones who more or less lay down
their lives so that the hero can win the day and actually transform. In fact, in Inside Out, do you remember the
clown, Boingo? (Crowd: Bing-Bong!) Bingo? (Crowd: Bing-Bong!) Bing-Bong. I'm a story expert. Yeah, Bing-Bong what does he do? He lays down his life so that the heroes can
keep moving, right? I'm sorry. I might've gotten a name wrong. He lays down his life so the heroes can keep
moving and be on their way. I think this is where we're heading in our
stories. We want to become the guide. I had this chance to interview Pete Carroll,
the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Go Hawks! And several years ago, and I sat down with
Coach Carroll. It was the most fascinating interview. He gave me 15 minutes. He gave me a 15-minute interview, and I went
up to Seattle, went to his corner office up there, and I thought, okay. I'm going to talk to him about 15 minutes. And really what I wanted to talk to him about
was not football. Coach has a backstory, and while he was at
USC, Coach Carroll was driving to work one day and he heard on the radio that some kids
had been killed in the inner city in gang violence, and of course his heart kind of
went out to them. Went to work; worked the day. The next day he's driving to work more kids
have been killed. By the end of the week 11 kids had been killed
in gang violence in inner city Los Angeles. Pete is one of those guys that doesn't have
a filter that says you can’t do this. You're not allowed to do this. So he thinks, I'm going to do something about
gang violence in the inner city Los Angeles while I'm winning 36 consecutive games as
USC's head coach. He's just like you and me. And so without telling his wife he gets up
from the middle of the night, gets in his car, and he drives into the most dangerous
neighborhood in Los Angeles. And he gets out of the car, and he just starts
walking around until they can find some kids. And they see him, and they say, "Aren't you
Pete Carroll?" He says, “Yeah” He says, "Listen. I've heard there’s a problem. There's apparently one group called the Crips
and another group called the Bloods, and you guys don't like each other. Can you explain some of that to me?" And they said, "Aren't you Pete Carroll?" Anyway, he ends up making friends with these
guys, and they become really close. He goes over and has dinner at their houses
all the time. He invites them to practice. And he starts an organization, secretly, called
a Better Los Angeles to help curb gang violence in Los Angeles. And just three years ago, the Los Angeles
Times released an article saying gang violence was rapidly on decline in Los Angeles, and
they listed several reasons. One of the reasons was Pete Carroll, and so
I wanted to know why. Why in the world do you care so much? And I said, "Pete can you explain to me why
your heart just got broken for these kids?" And he said, “Don, here's the story. You cannot-." This is before they won the Super Bowl. He said, "You can't print this, because people
get mad at me when I don't focus on football." And I said, "Okay, what's the story?" He said, "Early on, I won a lot. I mean I just won a lot." And he said, "Don, it was so empty." I would win and it was just like, "Ah, this
is empty." He said, "But then I discovered something. I discovered when I helped other people win
I feel fulfilled." And so it changed my whole mentality about
coaching. I just wanted my players to win. I wanted my assistant coaches to win. He had a report on how the janitor at the
USC stadium could win. Everybody around him, I just want to help
you win. And this was the difference between the coach. Now I can tell you that story, because he
won a Super bowl, right? He laid down his life. That's what the guide does. The guide lays down their life for other heroes
so that they can win. I'll close with a story about my youth pastor
in Texas at this little Southern Baptist church. His name was David Gentiles, and David Gentiles
was an amazing guy. He believed in me when nobody else believed
in me, there was no reason for anybody to believe in me. Gave me my first shot at writing and David
and I would keep in touch. In fact, Blue Like Jazz is dedicated to David
Gentiles. We kept in touch for years and remained friends,
and every once in a while David and I would talk. And I said, "Dave, you know you're an amazing
songwriter. You're an amazing writer. Are you working on your book, because I really
want the world to kind of know who you are? You are a brilliant, brilliant guy. And Dave would say, "Yeah, Don, I was kind
of thinking about this book." And we'd get started, and I'd kind of help
him with it, and then it would just die off and he wouldn't do anything with it. This happened for decades- twenty years. And David went from the youth pastor at a
church to kind of an associate pastor somewhere else, and every church he went to got smaller
and more dysfunctional as the years went on. Until finally he was in a church in Austin,
Texas that was really small, met in this little warehouse, and it was basically an Alcoholic's
Anonymous meeting gone really really bad. And I got a call one night from the pastor
at that church, Dave was an associate pastor, that said, "Don, I have really bad news for
you." I said, "What is it?" He said, "David was at a gym last night at
about midnight, and he was alone, and he was trying to reach his maximum bench press. And I thought, this isn't going to be a good
story. And the bar fell on him. He's in the ICU. He's not going to make it, and you need to
get on an airplane. And I got on the next airplane. David passed not that much later, and his
three daughters, we got them home from Europe, and from all over where they were. It was a rough, rough night. And they asked me to deliver the eulogy at
this little, bitty church of maybe 30 people. And so I started working on it in the hotel
room, and as I worked on it I found myself with so many mixed emotions, because he was
so much like a father to me. I found myself frustrated that he never let
the world know who he was, that he didn't have the impact that I wanted him to have,
that I got really successful, and nobody ever knew about David, and he's the one who had
all the talent and the heart. It seemed unfair to me, and as I prepared
that I'm just bawling, and crying, and pacing around in this hotel room trying to prepare
this Eulogy. Pastor called, said, "Don, hey, it's a small
church. A lot of friends and family are coming in. We moved it to this other church 20 minutes
across town, and we'll be doing it there. So just show up at that church for the eulogy.” I said great, perfect. Kept processing it. Why didn't the world know about David? Why didn't he go out there, and play that
heroic role, and bang the gong for himself? Got another call from the pastor. "Hey Don, we're going to have to move this
to another church. We're just getting a lot of calls." Okay. That sounds good. It was a big church, one of the bigger churches
in town. Okay, that's interesting. Keep working on my eulogy, writing all this
stuff. Get another call. "Don, last minute switch. We had to move this thing to a baseball stadium,
and I don't want you to get nervous, but there are going to be several news trucks there
covering this funeral." This guy never wrote a book, never wrote a
song. I get there, and I walk into this baseball
stadium, and all the grandstands are full, and then the hill above the grandstands are
full. There's multiple news trucks, and this guy
had literally changed his entire community one person at a time, laying down his life
for them saying it's not about me winning, how can I help you win? And I can't tell you how many books had been
written by the people in that crowd, how many songs had been written by people in that crowd. While I was writing about myself David was
writing me. He was building into my story, and this person's
story, and this person's story, and this person's story. We were his life's work. And then I look back at then I look back at
the life of Christ, who never wrote a book, wrote some words in the sand and they won't
tell us what they were. I'm pretty sure it was "Go Hawks." And you are His story. You are his story. This whole time he's been building you, and
the challenges that you face, He's put in your way, because He knows that you can overcome
them. And when you and I are tempted to play the
victim He says to us: "You are not a victim; you are a conqueror. You are a hero, and you are becoming the guide." We are born victims. We have a choice to become either villains
or heroes, and once we are through winning our heroic journey, and realizing it's mostly
empty, we learn to lay down our lives like Christ and give our lives to others. Can I pray a prayer of blessing over you as
so many of you begin your journey here at Liberty -some of you ending that journey-
that we would become the heroic characters God intended us to be on our path to laying
down our lives and becoming like Christ. Jesus, we're so grateful that you've given
us a place, and a community, and a group of people who will remind us over and over we
don't have to be victims; we can be conquerors. Will you help us as we fight, so hard, for
our identity? Who will we be? What role will we play? In Jesus' name, Amen.
