Issue 466
There is a famous British comedy sketch featuring four wealthy Yorkshire men reminiscing about their impoverished pasts. Each character out does the other outlining the suffering and deprivation of their childhoods. It taps into the older generations’ tendency to regale younger people with stories or hardship in order to instil a sense of proportion into the younger minds – and it’s very funny.
There is a power in invoking the past. How and what you remember can shape your presents. There is, as the Yorkshire men illustrate, a human tendency to embellish, but there is also, as the young generation illustrate, a tendency to forget.
Look at your business. When it was founded it would have started small. There will have been struggles, hardships and suffering. No large enterprise lives without the pains of birth.
Is it not also true that when success, expansion and prestige arrive so too does a generation that forgets the tough beginnings?
Nehemiah has completed his wall. People are living in houses. His city is being populated and settled. Spiritual infrastructure is being restored.
Then they find, within their Holy scrolls, a command to live in booths or tents for seven days in the seventh month of every year. This command came from Moses but had not been obeyed since the times of Joshua. That’s a gap of about 850 years. That’s an 850 year term of disobedience and forgetting.
When you understand what they were forgetting you will see why Nehemiah’s mind is so concerned with this correction. The feast known as the Feast of Tabernacles is supposed to remind the whole population of the time when they wandered in the Sinai desert and lived for 40 years in tents.
By graphic illustration the seven days each year were to help everyone reflect on their hardships of the past, not embellishing them, but connecting to them. More importantly, it was to help them remember the fact that for every day of those 40 years (14, 600 days) God had supplied them with food enough for that day (that’s 23 million, 346 thousand tons – multiplied by 2000 for pounds- of food).
The feast was also a reminder of a 40 year delay due to disobedience and rebellion which inhibited entrance to the promised land. Again, it also served as a memory of the temporary nature of the hardship since they did eventually enter their promised land.
So Nehemiah’s thinking is that, on finding the command again, they would, after 850 years put right the wrong and celebrate, opening up their memories to their history and reflecting on their struggle, survival and success.
Here’s the value of this thinking. Remembering your story, individual and corporate, will help you connect with your testimony of God’s commitment to your survival. It will give you a cause to celebrate and find strength in the joy of His faithfulness to you.
You’ll be able to walk through a memorial garden where you will see monuments to your own humble beginnings as well as various warning signs to help you remember your need to depend on God. In this same garden you can sit and reflect on the fragility of your early days and avoid the pride of forgetting. You will see the tombstones of those who went before and be grateful for their stories and you will discover that you only live by the grace of others.
Great business leaders like to consider themselves self-made men or women. All that means is that they have short memories. Nobody builds alone. Nobody pulls themselves up by their own boot straps. Tell that story to the young and you will be lying, like the four Yorkshire men, embellishing their own heroism in order to impress.
Walk in the authentic memorial garden and lessons, memories and mental nourishment will accompany you – and you will meet Nehemiah walking on one of the paths.
Nehemiah 8:13-18
On the second day of the month, the heads of all the families, along with the priests and the Levites, gathered around Ezra the teacher to give attention to the words of the Law. 14 They found written in the Law, which the Lord had commanded through Moses, that the Israelites were to live in temporary shelters during the festival of the seventh month 15 and that they should proclaim this word and spread it throughout their towns and in Jerusalem: “Go out into the hill country and bring back branches from olive and wild olive trees, and from myrtles, palms and shade trees, to make temporary shelters”—as it is written.
16 So the people went out and brought back branches and built themselves temporary shelters on their own roofs, in their courtyards, in the courts of the house of God and in the square by the Water Gate and the one by the Gate of Ephraim. 17 The whole company that had returned from exile built temporary shelters and lived in them. From the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day, the Israelites had not celebrated it like this. And their joy was very great.
In preparation for the next GEOFFSHATTOCKweekly, do feel free to email us your thoughts to wtw@worktalk.gs or leave a comment on our Facebook or Twitter profile. You can also visit our YouTube channel - get inspired and share Worktalk's vision with others.
Work well
Geoff Shattock
© Copyright 2024 Geoff Shattock
All GEOFFSHATTOCKweekly archives are for personal use only. For permission to use for any other purposes please email using the address below thank you.
WORKTALK LEARNING
1 Washington Villas, Hythe Road, Marchwood, Southampton, Hampshire, SO40 4WT United Kingdom
T:+44 (0)23 8086 8543
http://www.geoffshattock.com
comms@worktalk.gs
