At school – they teach us the three R’s – reading, writing & arithmetic. But who teaches us about life – sometimes, it seems that we leave all that to chance. As Forrest Gump once said, “Life is like a box of chocolates.”

So, who does teach us these stuff? Or we are somehow generationally doomed to repeat our parent’s mistakes? Have you ever seen the movie, ‘Forrest Gump’? It begins with a white feather up in the sky and it’s floating through the breeze. You know how a fine white feather dances in the breeze. It’s wafting along, it kind of has a sense of life being random, and it wafts along, and wafts along, further down, and further down, and it lands on Forrest Gump’s right foot. Forrest is sitting on a bench waiting for a bus by a park. And right from the beginning you can obviously see that the man is, well, simple. People come and sit on the bench and he talks to them, some of them want to talk and others don’t. He tells his life story and he offers them a chocolate. It’s a beautiful movie; it’s a must see. If you haven’t, go down to the video store and hire it.

You discover through the story, through the movie, that Forrest has been handed, well, a pretty rotten lot. I mean, you and me, we have some good things and some bad things happen, but Forrest is simple, his dad died early, and a whole bunch of really bad things have happened to Forrest Gump along the way and if you and I look back in our lives, we can remember the good things. We look at our Mums and Dads and most of us can say, well, there were some really good things that they gave us and did for us, and loved us but there were some bad things that I got handed down too. Maybe, a personality trait that you wish you didn’t have, but you do. And you look at your Dad or your Mum, and you think, “Ah, I know where I got that from.”

Maybe we have some insecurities because we weren’t loved properly or we have anger or we have sexual dysfunctional or we were never shown any affection so we can’t show affection to our loved ones. Maybe we had great parents, but they just … they just never taught us somehow to listen to other people, or how to work through struggles or how to deal with uncertainty. These life skills, maybe they were good parents. But well, their parents never taught them those things. It seems somehow, it’s like a box of chocolates, its like that white feather, it’s random, and it depends on who we got for parents.

I did a T. V. interview not so long ago, and I watched a video of it later and I was shocked to see a man sitting there talking, (it was me), that was an absolute spitting image of my dad. The mannerisms, I mean I had no idea. I looked at myself and I thought, “That’s my dad!” And people say to me, “you walk like your father walks.” And, he had some really strong points and he handed those down to me, but he had some weaknesses too, and as I grew up, I discovered two things. First thing, I happened to be very fortunate in that I’m intellectually very smart and I discovered that when I was at school, that my grades were always really good, and I was always right up at the top of the class. But I also discovered that I didn’t have some of the people skills that I needed. I am not, naturally, a good listener.

Naturally, when I was growing up, because I’m a talker, that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now, because I’m a talker, I discovered that I talked over the top of people, that I really didn’t listen to what was going on inside them, in their hearts, their needs, the deep things. I was not strong on collaboration. I grew up thinking, “well, Berni, you are pretty clever, you can do this on your own, you can roll over the top of other people.” And so, collaboration and consultation, I just wasn’t very good at those things and I’ll tell you, I was very much into knee-jerk reactions; when a curve ball came at me, I would have this knee-jerk reaction and get angry with people.

So, I discovered that these people skills, these life skills, in me, were not as good as they needed to be. And I didn’t discover that because I got good or bad grades at school. I discovered that in the school of hard knocks, through life, and that school of hard knocks was about failures and crashes and, and broken relationships. And then it was a bit like that white feather, you know, that phenomenon on Forrest Gump, that sense of randomness, of chance, it seemed like a ‘luck thing’. But in my work, I all of a sudden met someone who would be my mentor; someone who through life would teach me some of the life skills that I needed to have.

He was very bright. His name’s Graham and he and I are on the same wavelength. We formed a consulting firm together, and over the years, he would sit me down and say, “Berni, that meeting we were just in with that client, do you know you didn’t listen? Do you know that you talked over the top of them? Do you realise that you did this and that? There’s another way of looking at that, there’s another way of doing this.” And so, he invested, over a period of 20 years, life teaching into my life; and I am forever changed and forever grateful for that investment. The art of mentorship, of an older man mentoring a younger man, of an older woman mentoring a younger woman seems to be a lost art in our society. If you are an older man or an older woman with wisdom, I would strongly encourage you, as something that will fulfil you incredibly – whether it’s with your kids or someone you work with, or a friend’s son or daughter; to invest in them as their mentor, to guide and to advise and to help and to grow.

Somewhere through all of that, I came to faith in Jesus. I met this Jesus guy and I came to a saving faith in God. And by that I mean I don’t just believe, I know … I know that I am forgiven by God in Jesus Christ and that because of what He did for me on the cross I have eternal life – nothing I did. I just met this Jesus and was so excited when He came into my life, and I’ve given my life to Him.

And I look back on those ups and downs, on my parents, Mum and Dad who did a whole bunch of good things; on the gaps somehow in my life skills, on that school of hard knocks, and the pain that was involved in those hard knocks; on Jesus coming into my life and on this mentor; this Graham, who came into my life to bless me. It looked random at first: it looked a bit like the breeze that blew the feather, but what I discovered was that there was a hand behind all of that. It wasn’t like a box of chocolates at all. In all of that randomness there was a steady, guiding hand, waiting, helping, steering, just at the right time speaking. Psalm 27 verse 10 says:

Although my father and mother have forsaken me, yet the LORD God will adopt me as His child.

Now, I’ve never been forsaken by my Mum and Dad, but we all end up with some gaps growing up and some people are forsaken by their parents, and the most unexpected thing of all is that God has His hand on our lives and Jesus has this wonderful learning for life; it’s never to late.

This week and next week on a Different Perspective we’re going to be looking at a whole bunch of things like; the blind spots we have and our inability to listen and our inability to communicate and collaborate, dealing with uncertainty. All of those life skill things that sometimes we miss out on, and we’ll be looking at them from a different perspective. Join me.

We all have blind spots, although we hate to admit it. And as we know from driving a car, blind spots lead to accidents and accidents hurt. But what do we do about them? They are after all blind spots.

Over the years, I’ve learned that I have quite a few blind spots. I’m a very trusting person. I don’t expect people to do the wrong thing. I don’t expect people to fail me. I don’t expect people just not to do what they said they were going to do. Now that’s a strength, but it can also be a blind spot, because I overlook; I have a tendency to overlook people’s failures and weaknesses, to my detriment. At the other end of the scale, other people can be really suspicious. And it’s right at the other end, but it still has consequences, because it’s hard when you’re really suspicious to build trusting relationships.

You may have heard me talk about in the past, what I call hand-grenade syndrome. You know, when someone’s in their trench over there, it might be at work or in a club or in a group or in a family. They get in their trench over there, and the other party gets in a trench over there and all of a sudden, one of them throws a hand grenade. Maybe it’s a cranky or a nasty e-mail and the other one reacts and throws back a bigger hand grenade, and the other one says, “Well, they’re not going to get away with that.” And so they throw a bigger hand grenade away, and so it goes on.

We have blind spots. Sometimes, it’s about individuals and sometimes it’s about groups of people. Sometimes it’s easy to look at the unemployed and say, “Well, you know if they only got up and got a job … “Or, even in churches, you know, one denomination looks suspiciously at another denomination. Come on people, what we do with our blind spots is we trade reality for some substitute. It might be a stereotype, it might be, “well, I know what that denomination is like – they all like this … “Or it might be a picture, where we see someone at work and we think, “Well, you know, they’re not particularly good at A, B, and C, the things I’ve given them to do, they mustn’t be good at anything. “And so we take the reality and we replace it with a lie, and instead of looking at that person through the glasses of reality, we look at them through the glasses of a lie.

It’s easy to undervalue a person. And it happens through a blind spot, it happens because we judge them quickly on the first couple of things we see them do, or by the outside packaging. And what ends up happening is, this blind spot robs us, we miss out on the potential. We don’t realise what they’re good at. They get disgruntled; they progressively become less effective. They resign and (we) think, “Hang on, well where did that come from? Why have they resigned?” And all of a sudden we have to look for someone else to do the job, go and hire them, train someone new, pick someone with a different set of strengths and weaknesses and so the cycle goes on. It’s what happens in life, right? How do we deal with those things? Who teaches you this life stuff? We’re going through a series that I’ve called “The Things They Forgot to Teach Us When We Were Growing Up” and if we continue to have these blind spots and don’t do anything about them, we will continue to have crashes. And crashes will continue to hurt.

The alternative is that we deal with them, one by one. Now I have to tell you, when I have to deal with one of my weaknesses, it’s just not easy, and I know it’s the same for you. Firstly, we don’t want to acknowledge the weakness and secondly, when we’ve gotten into a habit of doing something a certain way it’s really hard to change that habit. So, what do we do about these blind spots? Where do we go? Who is going to help us and teach us some of these life skills? Listen to what Jesus said the very first time He got up to preach. He said, “God has sent Me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives. To give sight back to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to tell them all about God’s favour.”

I don’t know where you are in life, but for me it’s not that long ago that I would have scoffed at that and said, “Look, the last place I am going to learn about life, is religion. “Well, it’s not what I’m suggesting at all. What I’m suggesting is, that when we unpack what this Jesus has to say it’s radical, it’s life altering, and somehow He has this knack of getting in your face and calling things just the way they are. He was talking to some people once, and He said, “How is it that you can go to your friend and say, ‘look, let me get a speck out of your eye’ and at the same time you’ve got a dirty great plank in yours?” He said, “You hypocrites.”

Jesus was not into hypocrisy and when you read how He dealt with these 12 disciples, He was in their face when they were squabbling. He was dealing with the issues and He had some amazingly insightful things to say. Jesus somehow lovingly, effectively, confronts our blind spots. He’s real! And what we’re going to do over these next couple of weeks is have a look at some of the outrageous and confronting and profound things that He has to say.

And what I discovered was, as I began to listen to this Jesus, to read what He said in the Bible. I know, the Bible may not be a trusted book in your life. But sometimes we dismiss things because we have blind spots about them and they’re stereotypes. It’s amazing how realistic, what Jesus said is in the Bible. And so, I began to read what He said, and then I began to pray about it. And Jesus promises as we do, as we submit our lives to Him, as we read His words and have a relationship with Him, He sends His Spirit into us to speak to us.

Let me give you an example. One of the things Jesus said is, if we are His followers, we should be like a light on a hill. And we should be shining light into other people’s lives. We should be like salt, adding flavour to life for other people. Well, that’s what Jesus said, but how does that apply, to me, today? So, I prayed about it, and I really felt the Holy Spirit saying to me, what about your daughter, what have you done lately to be light and salt to her? Or the co-workers in your ministry? Sometimes God really leads me to pray for a program director or general manager of a station somewhere. And I ring them and encourage them and send them, “I just have been really feeling to bless you”.

Just very recently, God did an amazing thing. I’d been overseas to our parent ministry in America, ‘Back to the Bible’, and picked up a few things in the warehouse; a couple of books, some tracts, and a box of coffee coasters with Back to the Bible and a little Psalm on there, a beautiful picture. I came back home again, and as we were unpacking, my wife said, “What do you want to do with these coffee coasters?” I said, “I really feel that we should send them to this elderly gentleman named Melvin, who’s been a long time contributor to our ministry. I just have felt, he’s been on my spirit lately, to pray for him.”

So we sent him this thing. I just wrote him a lovely little note saying; you know, really appreciate you and just been thinking and praying for you.

Jesus somehow gave me an insight. Well, a few days later he rang me and he said, “You have no idea.” He said, “I’ve just come back from hospital. I’ve had an operation; I’ve got some blood clots. I’ve been really down and I kind of walked out to the letter box today and your little gift was there.” He said, “It just lifted me up so much.”

Jesus came to give sight to the blind. It’s a profound promise. It’s a promise we discover when we read His word and we let the Spirit work in us through trust and faith. It’s different, isn’t it? It’s maybe too practical. Maybe it’s not what we expected; try it, it works.

What they forgot to teach us when we were growing up. There are plenty of things. Dealing with blind spots and letting Jesus teach us is one of the things that a lot of us were never taught when we were growing up.

Join me again tomorrow, we’re going to be talking about learning to listen.

One of the most frustrating things in the world is when we’re trying to tell someone something and they just won’t listen. But what about when someone’s trying to tell us something.

I heard someone say once that most conversations aren’t dialogues at all; in fact, they’re two concurrent monologues. Two people talking at each other instead of alternately listening and then talking. You know, when you’re trying to get something across to someone, and you can see it in their eyes, they’re not actually listening to you. They’re figuring out what to say next. And you can see them sitting there, leaning forward, trying to say something.

We’re all guilty of it. You see it in meetings, at work all the time. You see it in families. People are talking at each other, but somehow no one’s listening. Why is that? Well, there have been some significant changes in society over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years. I remember when I was growing up, children were to be seen, but not heard.

Well, praise God! That’s changed. Kids are more included in the life of a family and in entertaining than they were in the past. As society is less formal, it’s less structured. As time goes on, it seems it’s becoming more open. People everywhere are more aware of the world through the media. I was in India, in a remote very poor, village not so long ago, and half the people had mobile phones. You know, the world is kind of opening up. You listen to the news, and at the end they say log on to our Website and have your say. Or they ask you to vote on a particular issue, and they’re taking a poll. In a sense, it’s a really good thing. In a sense, the fact that people are becoming more open and exposed and free to speak, is a wonderful thing. But having a relationship is not just about speaking; having a relationship is about listening too.

I love the story where Jesus was walking along, and he’d been healing people so there was a massive crowd following Him. Imagine if someone came to your town and he’d healed blind people and he’d healed people who’d never walked before and that are walking.

Probably, people would flock around this person, like a rock star, like, you know, like the Beatles have come to town, or like, you know some, like Bono is in town. So, so they would flock around Him. So He had this huge crowd following Him. And there were a couple of blind men begging, because there was no Social Security. They were begging on the side of the street and they were crying out to Jesus. “Jesus, Jesus!” Trying to get through the noise of the crowd, and people were saying, “Be quiet, you guys, this guy’s really important you know, don’t bother Him.”

And Jesus heard them, and He turned around, and what He said to them really floors me. I mean, here is the Son of God, and He knew exactly what they wanted and even if He wasn’t the Son of God, He didn’t have to be Einstein to figure that out: Here is Jesus healing people, here are these two blind men on the street, begging; what are they going to want from Jesus. Obviously, they’ll want some healing. But the very first thing that Jesus says to them is a question. He says, “What do you want me to do for you?” Questions are the most empowering form of communication.

When someone asks you a question, how do you react? When someone says to you, “Tell me about yourself, what are your likes and dislikes? Did you enjoy that? What do you think about this? Wow, I never quite saw it that way! How did you come to that conclusion? Hmm, I need to think that through. What if we came at this from a different angle? How would it look then?”

You may notice when you’re listening to this program; I use questions a lot. Because what I really want to do, with you, is to share what Jesus has to say by engaging you. And questions make us lean forward into something, questions involve us. What I’d really like is if we were just sitting opposite this table together, and we were able to talk and I could hear your answers. Well, radio is good, but it’s not that good.

And so, I love to use questions to get you to think about issues. Isn’t it wonderful when someone sits down with us at a function or a party or something where we’ve never met them before and they just begin to ask us about ourselves? We can all talk about ourselves, we all know.

And then people say, what do you think and how do you feel? There’s a secret; there’s a secret that most people don’t know about questions. It’s a secret that Jesus knows and it’s the reason that He asked these two blind men, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the secret is this: provided that we’re prepared to listen, I mean really listen and be moved by what the other person says, understand what they’re saying without judging. Provided we’re prepared to do that, the question empowers the other person. It invites them into a dialogue. The question shows them that we value them. The question is like an investment; it … it’s a building of a relationship. It’s an invitation to relate. And then lastly, you find out all sorts of really neat stuff. Engaging the other person makes them open to us.

This is something, I have to tell you. I spoke about my mentor yesterday, Graham. This is something he taught me through life. We worked together as consultants, and as a consultant when you’re walking into organisations and you have no real authority, the best way to gain respect and to open people up is to ask them questions. I had to learn this. I had to learn to close my mouth when someone else was talking, not to talk over people. How many of us talk over one another, and we just don’t realise it. It’s such an incredible act of disrespect. And deliberately, proactively ask questions, and when people answer them, sit there and listen and understand.

Understand their position, where they’re coming from. There are two sides to this whole thing of questions. Firstly, on one side of this coin is respect; it’s investing a relationship. And on the other side, it just makes sense because you find things out.

Stephen Covey in his book, ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, has a chapter that’s called, ‘Seek First to Understand, and then to be Understood’. He paints this picture of two people being in a room and one of them really wants to get something across. And it’s such a pressing thing that; until the other person listens; until the other person understands; until the other person is moved by what they have to say, it’s as though there’s no oxygen in the room. It’s as though someone sucked all the oxygen in the room. They can’t breathe. They can’t do anything until they get that first breath of oxygen, that sense that the other person’s understood them. And one of the things I love to do, and I’ve seen other people do it, is when someone has spoken – to show that I understand, to reflect what they’ve said.

So, let me just understand what you’re saying. Is this what you’re saying? And when we can explain it as well as they can, than we’ve heard them. Jesus, when He was teaching His disciples to pray, as we know the Lord’s Prayer. He said, you know, your Father in Heaven already knows everything that you need and want, but ask Him anyway. God wants us to speak. God already knows what we need but He wants to hear us speak. It’s a relationship thing. He loves us.

Learning to listen is one of the most productive things I have ever done. I’m still learning. Instead of judging a book by its cover, instead of causing someone down, instead of just not listening to them, what I have gained is the benefit and the wonderful gifts and abilities and insights of other people. One of the most valuable things that we can do is look at Jesus and say, “man, Jesus was and is a listener.” Maybe I need to be an imitator of that. Maybe I need to learn to listen, I mean really listen. I really trust that today’s message has helped you in your life in learning some of the things that, well, maybe they didn’t teach us when we were growing up.

As any coach will tell you, their team’s ability to win depends not only on the skills of individual players, but also on the team’s capacity to communicate and collaborate. Life’s a bit like that too.

This week on a Different Perspective, we’re looking at: bringing out your very best. You know, our parents and our teachers, we were taught at school the three R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

And mum and dad, well most people have parents who taught them, you know, the sort of things that you need to know. But often when we grow up, we find that we have, I don’t know, gaps in our lives, things that we’re just not good at. You know, we don’t know how to deal with our own blind spots. And sometimes we don’t listen so well. And, I mean, they’re the sorts of things that we’ve been talking about over the last few days and we will be talking about over the next week, as well on a Different Perspective.

I was sharing the other day that I was blessed to have a man by the name of Graham, who has been my mentor for the last 20 years or so. We often miss out on some important life skills when we’re growing up. And for me I was really blessed to have this man who has walked with me, professionally and as a friend, for the last 20 years, who’s helped me to develop some of those skills. Now if you’ve missed any of the programs that have gone in the past, you can listen to them again on our Website, ‘christianityworks.com’. I’ll tell you a little bit more about that at the end of the program.

Today, I’d like to build on those issues of blind spots and listening, and talk about communication and teamwork. We have a big focus these days on our individual skills. And that’s really good, I mean, people want to get more education, um, they get more training, they want upscaling. People want to become the best at what they do that they can possibly be. I think that’s a really positive thing. I … I’m a great fan of education. But, I wonder whether this renewed emphasis on individual skills means that we stop there.

What I can do on my own is limited, what I can do as a part of a team, however, is unlimited. We talked at the beginning of the program about that example of the sporting field. You know, when a team gets out there and plays a team sport, whether it’s football, or whether it’s baseball, or whether it’s cricket, or what – or netball, or whatever it is, they need to know how to communicate. And that communication is verbal and it’s nonverbal.

And one of my favourite games is cricket. And cricket is all about somebody bowling a ball and there are two batsmen, one at each end of the pitch. And they then both run and cross over in the middle when they score a run and they both have to get to the other end to score a run. And often you see people who are run out because the batsmen don’t have that depth of understanding.

They don’t know how to communicate, whether they should run or they shouldn’t run, and all of a sudden, two of them end up at one end, and so one of them is caught out. Good sportsmen in a team know how to communicate and they know how to collaborate.

Jesus, the Son of God, came and became a man on this planet. If anyone could do anything on their own, it’s Jesus, right? I mean, He’s the Son of God, and yet He gathered 12 disciples around Him. Peter, Peter was the leader, and he was the spokesperson; okay, he was a bit impetuous, but he was one of these people where he was in, boots and all.

Andrew, Andrew was someone who brought people to Jesus; Andrew was the, the evangelist. There was a pastoral, caring person in John; they had a treasurer, he ended up getting the sack, Judas.

This motley crew of fisherman and tax collectors, and right at the beginning, you know, over those three and a half years when Jesus had his public ministry and these 12 men lived and ate and worked with Him. You could see how there was friction and tension between them. And one day they were arguing about who would be the greatest of them. You know, that, that sort of thing was going on, and yet Jesus built a team, and this team; this motley crew of fishermen and tax collectors, this team became the apostles.

The men who began the Christian Church 2,000 years ago. The team nature of what they did was so important. No man is an island, we’ve all heard that saying; no person is an island is a better way of saying it these days, and yet when we rely just on ourselves, we’re limited. But as we get communication going with other people, as we talk to them and understand their strengths and their weaknesses, and say, “Well, you’ve got this strength, why don’t you do this thing? I’ve got this other strength, why don’t I do that thing?” And together, we will do something much greater than what we could have done individually.

A team hangs together on communication, on talking, on understanding, on accepting each other just as we are. On learning to listen, as we talked about yesterday. And sometimes when we learn to listen we hear things we don’t want to hear. We hear that someone on our team sees things 180 degrees opposite to our view. And we want to be tempted to roll over the top of them, and throw our hands up in disgust and walk away from them. That’s not teamwork, that’s not collaboration.

Within our own ministry, here at ChristianityWorks, we have wonderful people but we don’t always see things in exactly the same way. And part of my role, as the leader of the ministry, is to work through those communication issues and to make sure that we’re all heading in the one direction, even though we see things from a different angle. It’s just the reality of life; it’s the way things are.

So, on the one hand we can want to discontinue our relationship or cut them off, or judge people because they say things differently. On the other hand, we can communicate, we can listen, we can ask questions, we can really understand where they’re coming from, digest their perspective and learn something from it. And say, “Wow, you know, they’ve got a point here.”

You think, in a business, the clients service department, the people who are on the phones to the customers, the people who are out there in, in customer interaction. They’re going to see things differently from say, the accountants in the finance department, who are going to see things differently from the sales and marketing department, who are going to see things differently from the operations division. People come at things from different angles; the joy, the blessing, the strength is when we build it together as a team. And that means communication, and it means collaboration.

I was recently looking at a company and, they’re a commercial business, and one of its employees. This man had some real strength and he’s generated a lot of revenue for the company over the years, but he has some weaknesses and limitations, too. And those weaknesses were fairly well understood, and they need to be managed. He needs help and support in certain areas to do what he does well.

But for some reason, one reason or another, the company stopped doing that; they stopped supporting him. And all of a sudden, he became disgruntled, and all of a sudden, he started making mistakes, and all of a sudden, the relationship broke down and he left. Had they listened to him, had they understood him, had they managed the weaknesses, he would still be earning the revenue for them today, that he was yesterday.

Jesus says, “Love each other”. That’s not some kind of fluffy, woolly thing. Love is tough sometimes, love involves sacrifice sometimes. It involves communication, it involves collaboration, it’s about involving people who have different views and different perspectives in decisions and in processes, and together we can achieve so much more as a team than we could on our own.

I trust that you’re really enjoying this series on ‘Bringing out Your Very Best’. Tomorrow we’re going to be looking at another subject, how to build influence.

People are so busy these days – just getting their attention can be frustrating. Let alone getting them to do something for you. Grr … It can drive you crazy.

And it is a busy, crowded world we live in: e-mails and meetings at work, they just seem to bombard us. And at home it’s the kids, and their activities, and the sport, and entertainment and doing the tax return, and you know, it just all mounts up. And maybe you’re not in that situation. Maybe you’re a grandparent or maybe you’re a widow and you see your kids and your grandkids. They’re rushing around and doing all this stuff, and you’re sitting at home thinking, “Why don’t they ever ring me? How come they never pay any attention to me?”

Well, whether it’s at work or at home or wherever with our extended family, most of the people around us have too much to do. And because we have to focus on so many different things, to get something else on our agendas, well, it has to stand out from the crowd. And the one thing that really makes other people in our lives stand out from the crowd, is value. Jesus knew this. Jesus saw the disciples squabbling. And they were squabbling about who’s going to be first among them, who’s going to the more important, who’s going to be the kingpin, number one. And Jesus said, “Listen, guys, if any of you wants to be first, you have to be the very last, and you have to be the servant of all.”

Now, it’s easy to say, “Ah, well look that was 2000 years ago. I mean, life was a lot slower then and Jesus isn’t here now and well, we live in a much busier, much more sophisticated, electronic, entertainment focused world, what does He know?

But it turns out, that Jesus has a real point. Over this last week, I’ve been sharing with you, if you’ve been able to join us, about a man who has been my mentor for the last 20 years. His name is Graham – he’s a really wise man.

And he’s taught me a lot of things, a lot of the people skills, the living skills that were gaps in my life before I was able to work with him. He and I had a consulting firm together in the information technology industry. And one of the things I noticed with him, when we going to visit senior managers in client organisations or organisations we were trying to sell our services to, he would always make a point of stopping outside the senior manager’s door, and inquiring of his secretary, and saying, “Hi, how are you, my name’s Graham, what’s your name?”

And he would always strike up a relationship, and as we were leaving he would always say to her, and it was mostly her, the secretary. He would say, “Thanks so much, it was really great; nice meeting you, I’ll see you around.” And after a few of these, I said, “Graham, why do you bother? I mean, why do you do that? What is it with the secretary thing that you always say hello and you’re nice to them and stuff?” And he said, “Think about it, who’s the gatekeeper? Who do you have to get through on the phone and through the door before you can get into the senior manager’s office? The answer is: the secretary and if you haven’t got the secretary on your side, you’re just not going to get in and see the senior manager.”

And I recall, with one of our clients, an organisation in government that we worked with for many, many years, there was one particular senior manager who’s a really good guy. He’s extremely busy, and, and the managers reporting to him often couldn’t get in to see him, but Graham and I could get in to see him any time that we wanted to. It turns out that it’s the little things that count, in building influence with people. I was at a conference in the U. K. recently, and there was a man from a radio station from the Philippines there.

And I said to him, “Oh, we have an office in the Philippines, why don’t I put you in touch with him?” And so, when I got home, I sent him an e-mail and also our Filipino director an e-mail saying, ‘listen, you guys should get together for a cup of coffee’.

Well, one of my co-workers here at ChristianityWorks was saying to me recently, “Oh, my daughter’s, you know, on an exchange thing to Canada and she’s living there and it’s so hard for us to get to talk to her.” And so, I say to him, “Look, there’s a bit of technology on the internet called skype, s-k-y-p-e, and it lets you talk across the internet using some headphones and a microphone, anywhere in the world for free.” And so, I showed him how to use it, and where it was and how to get it. Very quick, and very easy.

It was just a small thing, and he rang me on skype just the other day and said, “Thank you so much that I can talk to my daughter.” What did it cost me, nothing? You might see an article that you think, “Oh, so and so would be interested in that, why don’t I send it to them with a personal, little handwritten note. Or go and visit someone on their own turf.”

You know, in companies, people often sit on the other side of the partition from one anther, and they send each other e-mails instead of going and having a cup of coffee downstairs and having a bit of a chat. Or, maybe you think of someone, and you give them a quick phone call and say, “Look, I was just thinking about you; how’s it going?” These days, these little things, go such a long way to building influence and relationship. These days, people call it marketing and networking, but it’s just plain common sense. Little things do a deposit in a relationship.

They say, “I value you”. Make a connection for people, as in the case of those people in the Philippines. Or, or sometimes, someone just needs a hand carrying the ball that next step, you know, through that next gate, they just can’t quite get there, but somehow you helped them to do that.

Proactively looking out for other people. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone wants to be first,” the one with the most influence in these people’s lives, “be the very last, be the servant.” Be the one who sees opportunities for other people and helps them through the gate. When you have a meeting, be there on time.

When you say you’re going to deliver something, deliver it when you said you would. Be the last, be the servant of all. I cannot begin to tell you how many doors have opened for me since I learned this. And sometimes, it’s obvious, I mean in the case of the secretary and the boss, it’s pretty obvious that she’s the gatekeeper. Or he’s the gatekeeper; great to see that these days there are more and more personal assistants and secretaries who are blokes.

That, that secretary is the gatekeeper to the boss, that’s obvious. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s not a case of wanting to get something out of someone, but you just see an opportunity where you can make a connection for people. Or help them, or invest in some way, or keep in touch, or go and visit and have a cup of coffee and build the relationship. Invest in the relationship.

Now, sometimes we feel like saying, “Well, I shouldn’t have to, they should invest in me.” Well, we do and you know why. Because most people never learned this stuff when they were growing up. Most people have never really read Jesus’ words, where He says, “If you want to be first, then you have to be the very last. You have to be the servant of all.” Most people have never really come to grips with the enormity of the wisdom contained in those very few words.

If we want to be first, if we want to be the people who really have influence with other people, we need to be the last; we need to be the servant. We need to be proactively looking for opportunities to bless and to help other people. Investment builds interest. We know that the reason you invest money in an investment account, or in the stock market, or in real estate is because you want to get a return.

Well, I’m not suggesting for one minute that we should invest in people just to get a return. But Jesus just nails this: if we want to have the influence with people, if we want to be able to pick up the phone and get straight through to people, if we want them to be the ones that ring us back; first, we need to invest in the relationship. Jesus is so full of real, nitty-gritty, practical, loving advice.

Next week on a Different Perspective, we’re going to continue with this series, ‘Bringing out Your Very Best’. We’ll be talking about what happens when people have knee-jerk reactions.