I remember seeing a cartoon. Crowds of people stretched to the horizon. From each mouth was coming the same question: What can one person do? This issue of Uplook is dedicated to inspire your own answer to that question.
A few years ago, a book entitled The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell made a stir. Its subtitle was, “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” The author makes some startling suggestions about the way major changes in society can happen suddenly and without warning. Ideas, he says, can spread the way a virus spreads an infectious disease. The moment when they “break out” is the Tipping Point. He describes the three rules of such social epidemics. The first is contagiousness; a property not only of viruses but of ideas as well. He writes:
Have you ever thought about yawning, for instance? Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act. Just because you read the word “yawning” in the previous two sentences—and the two additional “yawns” in this sentence—a good number of you will probably yawn…If you’re reading this in a public place, and you’ve just yawned, chances are that a good proportion of everyone who saw you yawn is now yawning too, and a good proportion of the people watching the people who watched you yawn are now yawning as well, and on and on, in an ever-widening, yawning circle.
The author’s point is well taken, and can be easily applied to words. Although the Bible uses the healthier picture of seeds being sown rather than germs being spread, the principle is the same. When I speak a verse of Scripture to someone, I actually plant it in that person’s mind. When that individual went out into the day, he or she had no idea that the Word of God would “spread” into their mind any more than they would know that a flu virus would invade their body. Of course every person has a choice as to whether the seed will be received into the ground of their hearts or not (see Lk. 8). But if I am faithful in proclaiming the Word, I know some of it will germinate. So it was with the early church: “They that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the Word” (Acts 8:4). “The Word of God grew and multiplied” (Acts 12:24). “And the Word of the Lord was published throughout all the region” (Acts 13:49). This Word, like a seed, has a life of its own; as Paul would later write: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).
Gladwell’s second rule is that little changes can somehow have big effects. He says we are prone to always expect a direct relationship between cause and effect. But, he says, “when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again…As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of [geometric] progression, because the end result—the effect—seems far out of proportion to the cause.” It was this principle that allowed eleven men to not only survive the onslaught of the Jewish Sanhedrin and the Roman Empire and the Gates of Hell, but to storm their ramparts and win the field. It is this principle behind the line, “If every one won one, and every ‘won one’ won one…” When a virus goes out into a population, it isn’t discouraged by the odds. It has a secret, the secret of reproduction, the secret of the Word-bearing church as well.
The third rule is the Tipping Point, that the difference between little happening and a great deal happening is often a little thing. It is one degree difference between rainfall and a snowstorm. A sentence can encourage or discourage depending simply on the tone of voice. What difference does a Hitler make, or a Ghandi, a Churchill or a Paul? What difference do you make? For the believer, the Tipping Point is often an encounter with the Lord, a prayer of consecration, a personal crisis, or perhaps hearing of another believer whose zeal is contagious, provoking us “unto love and to good works” (Heb. 10:24). May these stories be used for the Lord’s glory to start something in us that will spread like wildfire.
Written by J. B. Nicholson Jr