On the first Sunday of each month in my church, we have a testimony meeting. There are no assigned talks, just the emblems of the sacrament, then an open invitation for anyone in the congregation who feels prompted to stand and share their testimony of Jesus Christ. Sometimes it leads to good storytelling or themes that wander a bit from Jesus, but that is okay. There is something powerful about hearing real people speak from the heart.
This past Sunday, someone shared how much they love the Christmas season and how they had recently shown their four-year-old an old Christmas movie with Kris Kringle and the Winter Warlock. Halfway through, when the Warlock was strangling Kris Kringle, the child got so scared that the family turned the movie off.
The next person who stood up was incredibly insightful. He looked at the first speaker and said, “Don’t you know you never turn a movie off in the middle? That is where fear looms and the hero is losing. You have to ride it out to the end, and you will see it all turns out.”
I am listening to a book by Patrick Bet-David called Your Next 5 Moves. On his podcast, Valuetainment, he likes to ask entrepreneurs questions like, “Tell me how it felt when you could not pay the mortgage. How did you summon the courage to continue? What did you do when you were on the brink of losing your business? What got you out of bed?”
He says we are often misled by looking only at the successful entrepreneur, the end of the movie, without knowing anything about the tragedy in the middle of the movie, the part where the entrepreneur is in the clutches of the Winter Warlock. And the truth is, it is not “if” that terrible moments happens in business or life, it is “what was it like for you when it did?”
The middle is where the fear is. The middle is where the hero looks like he is losing. The middle is where quitting feels right. But if you keep your feet moving, if you stay in the story long enough, it will work out. It may not look exactly like you thought it would, but neither do my congregation's open mic testimony meetings. Neither did Kris Kringle's walk though the woods. But it might even be better.