Author: alistair50

What should Jim do?

Jim has stumbled into a small South American town, and he has a problem. A squad of government troops has arrested twenty natives, and lined them up against a wall to be shot. The squad captain tells Jim there have been anti-government protests in the region, and the twenty villagers have been chosen at random for execution as a deterrent to protesters. But, the captain says, since Jim is an honoured visitor from another country, he will grant him a guest’s privilege of selecting and shooting one of the natives himself. If Jim accepts, to mark the special occasion the other natives will be set free. If Jim refuses, then there’s no special occasion and all the natives will die. What is Jim to do? He wonders if he could grab a gun and save all of them. But, he’s massively outnumbered, the rescue would fail, and he would die along with the natives. So Jim has a terrible decision to make. The men against the wall and onlookers from the village are all begging him to choose and kill one so the others can live. Should he do that? Kill one and save nineteen? Or do nothing and allow twenty to die?

I’ve sourced that story from Bernard Williams,* a noted philosopher who used this as an argument against ‘utilitarianism’. Utilitarianism’s core idea is about maximising happiness for the greatest number, so an action is right if it’s beneficial for the majority.

The Jim story is not real; it’s a ‘thought experiment’, an imaginative tool to help us work through a complicated moral issue. There are many versions of the story, and others with similar dilemmas, because moral choices are often difficult.

So, if you were Jim, what would you do?

Keep in mind all the natives facing the firing squad want you to choose one of them so the rest will be spared. Their families want that too. Surely it’s best that one dies to save nineteen?

But these men are all innocent. How can you select one, point a gun at him, and pull the trigger? It would be an unlawful killing and you will be the perpetrator. Is it then a crime? Is it a sin? Could you look the man in the eye who’s about to die and believe you’re doing the right thing? Could you live with your conscience afterwards?

The simple utilitarian response would be: ‘Of course you shoot one to save the other nineteen. That results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number.’ All that matters is the maths. Losing one is better than losing many.

However, that logic can have serious consequences. In 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed much of the city. In the days immediately after the fire, citizens crazed with anger demanded someone be held accountable.  Mobs roamed the streets, and authorities feared riots would cause many deaths. Suspicion fell on Robert Hubert. The fact that he was a Catholic was not in his favour. Moreover, he confessed, perhaps because of the mob’s pressure. Hubert certainly didn’t start the fire. He couldn’t have because he wasn’t in the country when it began. But, despite his obvious innocence, the jury pronounced him guilty and he was hanged. His death likely saved others from dying at the hands of mobs. But did that justify a wrongful execution?

Hubert’s fate shows the problem when moral judgments are made simply by calculating the number who gain versus the number who lose. It can’t be that simple.

It isn’t that simple. Life isn’t simple. In his poem Marmion, Sir Walter Scott talked about the tangled web we weave, and tangled it is. Here are three real-life situations I know personally.

A couple watched their adult son descend into alcoholism. Some nights they roamed the streets searching for him, occasionally finding him unconscious in a shop doorway. They gave him money to pay his rent, and money to buy food and clothes, but he spent it all on drink. They became desperate to save their son. But the advice those parents were given was to stop helping, because their son had to reach absolute bottom before he’d change. That seemed too hard. The couple believed he’d die before that change would come. What was the the right thing to do?

A younger couple, with no children of their own, fostered a bright ten-year-old girl. Her background was dreadful, but for about four years they were a happy family together. Then it all changed. The fourteen-year-old had joined a bad crowd, begun staying out late and sometimes didn’t come home at all. Her foster-parents knew she was drinking and perhaps taking drugs. They were seriously worried she’d get pregnant. They tried everything to help her change, but it all failed. They couldn’t let her behaviour continue, but alerting social workers would mean their foster-daughter was taken from them into care. What was the right thing to do?

In 1999, Odisha (formerly Orissa) in India was devastated by a cyclone and super-cyclone in rapid succession.** Winds reached 160 mph, and the sea was driven inland to a depth of five to six metres for 20 miles, contaminating the land with salt so nothing would grow. Cattle and goats were destroyed, and up to 30,000 people perished. Soon after the cyclone I visited the area. The people in one of the devastated villages told me how everyone had rushed into the village’s only concrete building. They were so crammed in they had to stand upright in waist high water for three days until the flood subsided. Because they did, most lived. But, unable to plant crops, and with no animals, many would die of hunger in the weeks ahead. A team of young people was with me, and they spoke to as many as they could (with the help of a translator). They met a grandmother clutching a young baby whose parents were lost. Grandmother grabbed the arm of one of our team, and begged, ‘Take the baby with you. She’ll die if she stays here.’ For many reasons the aid worker couldn’t take the baby. Besides, why this baby? There were thousands – tens of thousands – at risk. But yet, she was being asked about this baby who, sadly, would indeed probably die. What was the right thing to do?

Jim’s story and these other stories bring home two truths to me.

Life is messy and difficult. It’s complicated. Over the years I’ve been privileged to listen to many who shared the hidden parts of their lives, things most would never know about them. A disturbing number were told by a parent, ‘I hate you. I wish you’d never been born.’ How does anyone say that to an eight or ten-year-old? It leaves a dreadful legacy. Another legacy lives permanently in those who experienced sexual assault as a child. For others, the secrets were current. Some had health problems that would seriously shorten their lives. Or depression, that robbed every day of colour or joy. Or tension in their marriage that might soon cause it to fail. Or debt from which they could see no escape. Not everyone’s story is dramatic, but everyone has a story which includes hard challenges. When my wife, Alison, studied sociology of health, the lecturer said that most people think everyone else is so much healthier than they are, but they’re not. That’s also true about life. We assume most people are having an easier time than we are, but they’re not. Life is messy and difficult.

Answers are not obvious. I’ve known people with ready-baked solutions for almost everything. They have no uncertainty; there’s only a right way or a wrong way. They’d have instant answers for Jim and everyone else I’ve mentioned, and they’d be certain their answers were right. I can’t share their certainty. I can’t pronounce an obvious right way through wretched problems because often there isn’t an obvious right way. A lot of the time we simply don’t know the right thing to do. Accepting that is an important first step, because a pre-determined, formulaic answer may be entirely unsuited for a complex problem.

Jim faced a wretched dilemma in the South American jungle. Who would want his choice? The author behind the story – Williams – hints at his own answer by suggesting we’re responsible for what we do rather than what others do. That makes sense to me, but I can’t imagine I’d ever feel comfortable with either decision.

I’ll finish, then, with a World War II story in which someone took personal responsibility at great cost. This is a true story, told in Ernest Gordon’s moving book Miracle on the River Kwai.*** Gordon and many other allied POWs were made to work in Thailand on railway construction by their Japanese captors. Their conditions and treatment were brutal and appalling. Yet there were many examples of great heroism among the prisoners.

An Argyll soldier had laboured all day on the railway. He and the rest of his work detail were marched back to camp, tools were laid down and counted by a guard. (There was a suspicion that prisoners might sell tools to local Thais for food.) The guard shouted that one shovel was missing. He screamed with rage, worked himself into an out-of-control fury and shouted that the guilty man must step forward. No-one moved. The guard lost control and shrieked that all would die. He readied his rifle, and pointed it at the first man in the line. Then one prisoner stepped forward. The Argyll stood to attention and quietly said he’d done it. The guard’s rage exploded in extreme violence. He kicked and beat the soldier, but still he stood there. Infuriated, the guard lifted his rifle by the barrel, and crashed it down on the Argyll’s head. The prisoner fell to the ground. He was clearly dead, but the guard continued to pound on his body until too tired to inflict any more retribution.

The other prisoners picked up the Argyll soldier’s body and their tools and returned to their camp. At the guardhouse, the tools were counted again. None were missing. The guard had miscounted. The Argyll had given his life to save his fellow prisoners.

Did that soldier do the right thing? If love for neighbour was that man’s guiding principle, I believe he did. Was it an easy decision? No, I suspect it was very hard. After all, none of the rest of his squad moved. But, on that day and in that situation, the Argyll made a decision he believed in. I try to make decisions I believe in. I suspect that’s all any of us can do.

*Smart, J., & Williams, B. (1973). A critique of utilitarianism. In Utilitarianism: For and Against (pp. 75-150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511840852.002

**There’s a Wikipedia page about that super-cyclone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Odisha_cyclone

*** Gordon, E. (1965) Miracle on the River Kwai, Fontana, London.

Procrastination

I’m a procrastinator. There, I’ve said it. I’ve been meaning to do that for a long time.

That last sentence is a joke, but not the first sentence. Apparently I was born on my due date, but it’s been downhill ever since in respect of getting things done in good time. Homework for school was always last minute. I needed ‘extensions’ for most of my university essay assignments. Preparing sermons involved stealing hours of sleep the night before the preaching date. It was the same when I wrote books. Editors gave me final deadlines so I would submit the work. I coined the phrase, ‘A deadline is the mother of motivation’ because nothing else got me going.

Not everyone procrastinates, but the procrastination club does have a lot of members. And those members ‘never quite get round to doing…’ everything from buying groceries or returning a phone call, to making life-significant decisions like changing careers or proposing marriage. For some, it’s not just procrastination about proposing marriage but procrastination about getting married. I worked beside a woman who’d been engaged for twenty five years, and she and her fiancé still hadn’t fixed a wedding date.

Procrastination is not laziness. The lazy person can’t be bothered to get off their couch, but the procrastinator could be energetic and active about many things, just not the right things, not the things that should be done. They’re postponed until…? Well, procrastinators prefer never to answer the ‘when’ question.

Nor is procrastination necessarily indecision. Often the procrastinator knows exactly what to do but just doesn’t get round to doing it. It’s inaction as much as indecision.

Why procrastinate?

Here are reasons that have sometimes applied to me.

I procrastinate when I’m not sure what to do or how to do it    There’s a warning light showing on the dashboard of my car. It’s not obvious what that light signifies, and the car is running fine. So I’ll do nothing and see if the light goes off. I should cut our tall hedge lower, but should it be down to six feet, seven feet, or compromise at six and a half feet? I’ll have to think about that… So far, that’s been for about a year. This kind of procrastination is compounded either when I have to choose between several options or when a decision can be delayed, because then it will be delayed.

I procrastinate when I’ve so many things to do I don’t know which to do first    I could prepare the talk I have to give next week. I could read the book I’m committed to study. I could walk the dogs. I could hang the pictures that have rested on the floor against the wall for ages. I could finish repairing the liner on the garden pond. Or I could do any of another twenty things. The multiplicity of tasks is a fog I can’t see through to what matters most. So, instead, I’ll go and play golf. A casual game of golf is neither urgent nor important, but a lot more pleasant than dealing with the things which are. Procrastination loves diversion to unimportant alternatives.

I procrastinate when I don’t want to do a hard thing    I don’t actually want to cut the hedge. It’s not an easy or fun job, so inability to decide on its height justifies delay. If I would be fined if I hadn’t started cutting my hedge by 12 noon, I’d say, ‘Okay, it’ll be 6 feet 6 inches’ and get the hedge trimmer out. But with no looming fine, I put off the work. Which is what I do with many ‘not easy and not fun’ things. One day I’ll probably have to do them, but not this day. Procrastination thrives on hard-to-do stuff.

The let-me-do-everything-now people of this world can’t understand why procrastinators are procrastinators. It’s just not sensible. It’s not rational. But rationality doesn’t have complete command in virtually anyone’s life. Our shortfalls are different, and, in my case, it includes procrastination.

I have no doubt, though, that procrastination is damaging and can be dangerous.

In practical things    My car’s warning light does mean something’s wrong, so perhaps one day the engine will fail or I’ll have an accident. My taller and taller hedge won’t kill anyone, but it is getting progressively harder to cut.

In relational things    At the end of a church service, a delightful older lady asked me if I’d give her a call as she had something she wanted to talk about. It didn’t sound urgent, so I put if off… After two weeks she called me. She was polite but she was mad at me. I’d said I’d call, but hadn’t. She felt unimportant.

In economic things    I was driving from Glasgow to Aberdeen late one night, a journey of nearly three hours. Mid way home – probably around midnight – I became aware of headlights in a field off to the side. Had a car gone off the road? I glanced over. No, the headlights were moving. Then I realised. It was the time of year when farmers cut down their crops, and this farmer was driving his combine harvester up and down his field. ‘Foolish man,’ I thought. ‘He should be in his bed.’ I got home, went to sleep, and woke the next morning to the sound of the wind howling, rain lashing and then hailstones crashing down. What if the farmer hadn’t worked through the night to get his harvest in? He’d have lost it. Delay would have been economically disastrous.

In psychological things    I thought I was bad when my email inbox had 500 messages. Until, that is, I found a colleague had 5000. And then I heard of someone with a crazy number like 50,000. But comforting yourself that you’re not as bad as others is false and cold comfort. I still had 500 emails I’d not actioned, and that weighed on my mind. What had I read and then neglected? What important message had I never even read? A procrastinator lives with constant anxiety that more and more things are mounting up, things that should be done but aren’t done. It’s a heavy burden to carry.

Have I found the answer to procrastination? Certainly not.

But I am better than I once was.

Here are the four key steps to improvement that I’ve taken.

  1. When I don’t know where to start, I start somewhere that matters. In other words, I no longer divert to something easy but unimportant. Instead, I take anything from my must-do list and do that. The result is one thing less on the list, and a feeling of satisfaction that motivates me to take on another must-do item.
  2. When I actually do something I’ve been postponing, I reward myself. The reward can be as small as a coffee and cake moment, or reading a (short) chapter of a novel. I’m celebrating an accomplishment. And the reward motivates me for more accomplishments.
  3. I remember a sentence I read many years ago in a ‘spiritual autobiography’ of the Scottish theologian, William Barclay. He was talking about ‘writer’s block’ for those who prepare sermons or academic papers. I won’t get Barclay’s words exactly right, but it was as snappy as ‘The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair’. Just sit down and start. That advice has helped me many times.
  4. I came up with a phrase of my own, and have used it to challenge congregations or audiences to actually make the changes in their lives they’ve always said they would. My phrase is: ‘Today is yesterday’s tomorrow’. Some promised yesterday that they’d lose weight. Some resolved to repaint a room. Some decided to get up earlier and exercise. All of them promised to start tomorrow. But they didn’t. All they did was invent new tomorrows. So I challenge them: today is the tomorrow you promised yesterday. This is the time – perhaps the last time you’ll have – to make the change you promised. Now or maybe never. And I accept that challenge personally. A promise for tomorrow is meaningless if that tomorrow never dawns.

Perhaps the most famous procrastinator in English literature is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His lack of action is blamed for the deaths of many. I certainly hope my procrastination has never led to such dire consequences. But there have been negative consequences, and I regret each one.

And I’ll regret procrastinating about posting this if I don’t do it now!

When the right thing to do is nothing at all

I have a plan to revolutionise penalty-saving across football, whether teams are in the lowest amateur leagues or right up there in the premier division. In a nutshell, here’s my wisdom for goalkeepers: when your job is to save a penalty, don’t dive left; don’t dive right; in fact, don’t dive at all.

Before I explain I should admit my credentials as a football coach are completely non-existent. Best I can offer is experience from my youth when I played football constantly – in the school playground, on common land every summer evening, and representing my school sometimes. My position was always goalkeeper. Negatively, that was because I couldn’t run fast. Positively, I had quick reactions, great ability to catch a ball, strong sense of positioning, and I was willing to dive for the ball at the feet of an onrushing opponent. The last of these left its mark on me; quite a lot of marks actually.

But my revolutionary goalkeeping insights are from recent observation, not old experience. When I watch football, and the referee awards a penalty, here’s what happens: the goalkeeper stands midway between the posts, the penalty-taker runs forward, the keeper dives left or right, and accidentally or intentionally the ball is hit dead centre. Because the goalkeeper moved position, the ball goes straight into the net. If only the keeper had stood still…

I assure you there’s more to this blog than football advice, so stay with me just a little longer.

To explain my penalty-saving theory, you need to understand these things. Penalty-takers dread one thing above all – missing the goal completely by firing the ball over the top or outside the uprights. So they’re motivated to play safe. Goalkeepers dread something too, failing to stop a shot they could have saved. So they’re motivated to attempt the dramatic catch in the corner. Put those motivations together, and here’s what you get: kickers don’t want to strike the ball to the edges in case they miss completely, while goalkeepers dive as far to the side as they can in hope of pulling off a stunning block. Those factors lead to one result: all a penalty-taker has to do is shoot more or less straight and they’ll score because the keeper isn’t there any more.

However, if goalkeepers just stood still but alert with arms reached out, they’d have a good chance with their body or hands to block a lot of penalty kicks. What if strikers guess the keeper won’t move much? Then they’ll have to aim for a corner and sometimes they’ll completely miss the goal.

Well, that’s the theory. Will there be mass-adoption of my method? Not a chance. Faced with an ace penalty-taker, goalkeepers wouldn’t dare not attempt a spectacular save by diving sideways.

But what goalkeepers won’t do is exactly what leaders should do sometimes. I have to write sometimes because there’s no single formula for all situations. Sometimes the right thing for leaders to do is nothing.

However, it’s important to note two things about that choice.

First, it must be intentional. Not moving isn’t a passive option; it’s an active decision.

Along life’s way I studied for an MBA (a management degree). Advice I picked up that has stuck with me was this: ‘Often the worst decision is no decision’. I agree with that.

So when a leader refuses to budge, that can’t be a ‘no decision’ position. It’s positive. It’s intentional. It’s wisdom that, at that moment faced with those circumstances, deviating is wrong. To change would be a bad option.

Here’s an example. From time to time as a church minister the challenge I faced was ‘the new thing’. People get itchy for something different, exciting, miraculous, or anything that seems to fast track them to super spiritual status. They could be stirred by new worship styles, new teaching, new methods to grow the church, new approaches to the mission of the church, new ways to live close to God.

At 8.00 in the morning, I was phoned by one of our church leaders. He was excited. He’d been to a meeting the previous evening when, as he put it, ‘The Spirit fell on everyone there, and lives were changed.’ His message to me was blunt: ‘We’ve got to get on board with the new thing God is doing. This is the second Pentecost, and if we’re not part of this wave of the Spirit we’ll be bypassed.’ Calls like that aren’t music to any pastor’s ears at any time of day.

But I’d already checked out the new movement he was talking about. It wasn’t unlike other ‘new things’ in the past (so, not really all that new at all), and it certainly wasn’t a second Pentecost. Sure, it offered spiritual experiences, and I believed they were helpful for some. But overall this movement’s message was that you come with your failure and inadequacy, fall under the Spirit’s power, and leave an hour or two later turbo-charged with holiness and spiritual victory.  It was as if core disciplines like prayer, Bible reading, learning, sacrifice, could be bypassed, not needed any more. All that mattered was being touched by the Spirit.

God does touch people, but in the Christian life there are no exemptions from the hard graft of denying self and taking up the cross every day to follow Jesus. (Luke 9:23) Faith is a free gift, but living it out always involves cost. And there are no discounts.

I assured my caller our church would take what was good from ‘the new movement’, but we weren’t abandoning all the old things – foundational things – that were at the heart of our faith and mission. And the movement the caller was talking about? It was gone within a couple of years.

I made a firm decision that we weren’t swerving away from where we stood. It was the right decision.

Second, you need to own your choice. When there’s a penalty, my guess is that goalkeepers get whispers from teammates, some saying ‘Dive left’ and others ‘Dive right’. I got those whispers in my management positions. (Except, usually they weren’t whispers but loud and strong opinions.)

One colleague came to my office and laid out radical change for the organisation, and when I didn’t agree accused me of ‘not being willing to take risks’. I pointed out the many risks I’d taken before he joined us, but that, of course, didn’t satisfy him. He wanted me to take his risks. They were risks so large they could have damaged our reputation and bankrupted the organisation. Well, he wasn’t the CEO; I was. And I refused. He wasn’t happy and probably shared his feelings with others. But an organisation can’t jump this way or that way to keep someone happy. I owned my decision to stay firm. I knew then it was right, and with time everyone knew it was right.

Owning your choice matters also in a different sense. Sometimes your choice will be wrong. That’s inevitable. Even successful businesses have failed strategies because no individual and no team can anticipate every outcome. When there are disappointments there’s also criticism. If the penalty-taker shoots the ball into the corner of the net, the goalkeeper who hasn’t dived to save it (no matter how unlikely a save was) will be blamed. And, when things go wrong, leaders will be blamed, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. Bad leaders divert blame to others, which is cowardly. I believe in admitting mistakes and accepting responsibility. As long as I know within myself that I reached the best decisions I could, I can live with negative consequences when plans don’t work out. To survive, leaders must own their choices. Leadership isn’t for wimps.

That last sentence is important. For a goalkeeper to face a penalty kick and stand still in the middle of his goal takes great courage. And it takes great courage too for a leader in any area of life to hold steady when voices around urge ‘Go left’ or ‘Go right’. Surprisingly often, the right thing is to stand firm exactly where you are already.

Unconditional love

I am being followed. Not by the intelligence services. Not a stalker. But, almost anywhere I go, he’s there. Watching, listening, taking account of everything I do. I know who’s doing it. I even know his name. It’s Mac. He’s been after me for years.

Mac is my dog. We have two dogs, but Mac is my follower. If I walk across the room, he comes too. When I sit down, he lies nearby. If I go to my home office, Mac joins me. (He’s here right now.) When I go to the bathroom, Mac would be there too, except I refuse him entry. But he’ll wait just outside for me.

I’ve no idea why he’s so devoted. He just is. My companion, day after day after day.

I read something today that seems to give Mac a higher love and loyalty rating than God. Here it is:

As long as you praise the lord and love him with all your heart and repent your sins, he will always love you with his unconditional love.

Within 27 words, the writer has managed to contradict himself. I don’t suppose he realises it, but what he’s said is: ‘Here are the conditions to get something which has no conditions.’

The conditions he specifies are what you must do to be loved by God. ‘As long as…’ introduces three requirements: you must praise the Lord; you must love him with all your heart; you must repent of your sins. Fulfil these, and you get ‘unconditional love’ from God. That’s contradictory! You can’t lay down conditions to be loved and also call that love unconditional.

The writer’s sentence is what most would call a quid pro quo statement. ‘If you do this, I’ll do that.’ In other words, you give something, you get something. If you don’t give, you don’t get.

A troubling truth is that quid pro quo language is common. We are told it, and we tell it. When I was young, the run-up to Christmas would be peppered with warnings from my parents: ‘You’ve not been at your best this year… Santa won’t bring you presents unless you’re a good boy.’ Conditions. I confess I passed on equivalent warnings to my children, and not just at Christmas. Statements like: ‘If you don’t tidy up your bedroom, you won’t get to watch your favourite TV programme’. Conditions.

We’re bombarded with messages which say that to be popular you must have great social skills, be clever, and perhaps above all look good. An appalling example is the song Keep young and beautiful. According to the lyrics you must get rid of body fat, and take care of your charms to be in someone’s arms. The refrain is: ‘Keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved’. So, if you’re old and wrinkly, no-one will love you. As someone increasingly old and wrinkly, I’m disturbed. Actually, we should all be offended.

But the song, and much advertising, fits with the self-esteem deficits most of us have, consciously or subconsciously. Somewhere inside lurks the dark thought: ‘No-one’s going to love me unless I deserve it’. That’s damaging logic for human relations.

It’s even worse logic when applied to our relationship with God, because our efforts to earn acceptance will never be enough.

So it’s just as well they don’t have to be. God doesn’t love anyone, not even the best of the saints, because of their goodness. He has loved us long before we knew it, thought about it, or reacted to it. I’ve always been moved by the sentence in Romans chapter 5: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (v.8) Nothing about Jesus’ sacrifice depended on a religious background, a meritorious life, praying a lot, reading the Bible from cover to cover, or anything else we might have believed would impress God or merit his love. Which is just as well for me, because I could never have earned it.

At least the writer of the contradictory sentence included the two important words: ‘unconditional love’. That is the right description of God’s love. There’s no quid pro quo. We don’t give something so God will give something. We don’t go half way to God so he’ll come half way to us. God is one hundred per cent the giver. He comes all the way to us.

Absolutely it’s essential that we receive that love, surrender our lives, and follow him wherever that takes us on life’s journey. But his love is utterly and simply just given. Wonderfully unconditional.

‘Okay Mac, it’s time for lunch,’ I say. And off we go…

Dream on

Years ago I heard Rev Tom Houston (at that time, President of World Vision International) open a conference talk to ministers with a story I’ve never forgotten. Here’s the gist of it.

A wealthy Texan rancher gathered a hundred or more of his friends to his lavish home. The food was good; the company was good; being in the rancher’s presence was good. None of them knew their host had an ulterior motive in bringing them together. The rancher gathered his guests at the poolside, and made a speech which finished this way. ‘I want to find the bravest young man among you. So, I’m offering a prize. You can have $1 billion, or the whole ranch, or my daughter’s hand in marriage – if you swim one length of my pool. But I should warn you, the pool is filled with flesh-eating fish.’ Everyone stared at the water. Sure enough, piranha-like fish were thrashing around in there. For a moment no-one moved. Suddenly there was a splash, and one of the young men was in the water, and he was swimming for all he was worth. The water churned, the fish attacked, and blood poured from wounds on the young man’s body. But still he swam, pulling his arms and kicking his legs to power his way through the water. He was half way there, bleeding, hurting, but still swimming. Three quarters, and everyone was sure he would die. Somehow he kept going, got to the pool’s edge, and hauled himself out. He was badly hurt but he’d done it. The rancher ran over and said: ‘You’re a remarkable young man! Tell me which prize you want: the $1 billion, the ranch, or my daughter’s hand in marriage.’ The swimmer stared up at him, and replied, ‘All I want is to know who pushed me in.’

I laughed, as did Houston’s audience. But, for many of the ministers present, their laughter was hollow. They’d started out with optimism, confidence and a sincere belief they’d make a difference in many lives. But the reality didn’t match. Numbers in church had declined. Some in the congregation were sharp critics. The pastors felt seriously under-appreciated. They were sacrificing to serve, but met with piranha-like attacks on their ministry. Now they were hurting, deeply and probably permanently. Who pushed them in to work like this?

Far more than ministers ask that question. People start out cheerfully and hopefully into a career or a relationship. It begins well but doesn’t last.

I’ve seen it happen with young people chasing sporting dreams. A youngster excels at playing golf, so their goal is to be a professional and win the Masters or the Open Championship. None I’ve known have done that. Some have gone into deep debt playing on ‘mini tours’ but never winning. Some accept their career will instead be teaching golf lessons and selling clubs in a golf course shop. Some give up completely on golf. The pro at my course left recently, and is now tiling bathrooms and kitchens. End of the dream.

Not everyone who graduates with a medical degree ends up practising medicine. Some divert into related work; some change careers completely. I’ve known young lawyers, who began full of idealism that they’d help people fight for truth and justice, finally settle for a life writing business contracts. The salary was good, but they could hardly bear thinking about another thirty years of the same work. End of the dream.

I’ve married lots of people, by which I mean I’ve conducted their wedding services. Those were good experiences. The couples, young and not-so-young, were brimming with excitement for their future together. I wish they were all together still, but they’re not. One of my first attempts at saving a couple’s marriage was a miserable failure. I urged the departing wife to make another effort for the marriage. ‘I don’t want to try,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to save the marriage. It’s not what I thought it would be.’ End of conversation. End of marriage. End of the dream.

I should quickly say that sad outcomes for careers or relationships are not everyone’s experience! Plenty are doing well.

But, for some, the dream withers and dies.

Are there ways to ensure dreams always have happy endings? No, there aren’t. The complexities of life and our psyches rule out trite formulas for success.

But two maxims about dreams seem true.

Chase your dream; no-one else’s    In my teens I talked several times with my parents about what kind of work I wanted to do. By 13 or 14, I’d abandoned my ambition to drive a bus, and accepted I wasn’t going to play rugby for Scotland. I was doing fairly well at school, but no intellectual star and none in my family had ever gone to university, so no-one (including me) imagined that would be in my future. ‘Perhaps you should go into banking,’ my Dad said. ‘It’s a safe career, and if you pass your banking exams you’ll be promoted and earn a good wage.’ What if I’d done that? Two things would have followed: a) I’d have hated every minute; b) I’d have been out of a job long before promotion – simply because banking changed, and thousands were made redundant through rationalisations. I couldn’t have known the second of these, but I was dead certain of the first. Banking was my Dad’s dream of a safe and good career, but never mine, and thankfully Dad never pressed it.

But someone owning their own business and longing that it stays in the family may well pressurise their child to work in the shop or office with a view to taking over one day. That pressure can be hard to resist. Or youngsters are encouraged into the professions their parents always wished they’d followed. ‘Become a doctor, and save lives…’  It’s hard to argue against saving lives. Or cases are made by parents for other careers they esteem, like being a lawyer or an architect, or to follow a family tradition of working in the local factory or (as it used to be) going down the mine. ‘It was good enough for your Dad and Granddad, so it’ll be good enough for you.’

I wouldn’t judge the virtues of any of these career paths. But I would urge young adults to follow their dreams, not someone else’s dream for them. Chasing a dream you don’t ‘own’ ends in boredom, disappointment, and perhaps an early mid life crisis. It can never fulfil the deepest hopes of your heart.

Your dream must be earthed in reality   Even when the dream really is your dream, the road you’ll travel won’t be easy. My first career role was in journalism. I studied Pitman’s shorthand (not easy), touch typing (a life-long asset), law, current affairs, journalistic practice, and eased my way into reporting large and small stories for the paper. I attended a train crash, plane crash, and car crashes. They were gruesome, yet also exciting in some dreadful way. But sitting for hours in a minor court hoping at least one case would be interesting stirred not a single fibre of my being. I learned always to wear a warm, waterproof coat every day, because I might find myself standing in the cold outside a building for two hours waiting for a Council meeting to finish, hoping someone would tell me what had been decided. And, after two hours of freezing, they might not. Days like that were not exciting. That was the reality.

The reality of work for many is redundancy, or being overlooked for promotion, or being assigned brain-numbingly boring work. And marriages aren’t about a wonderful wedding day, they’re about years and years of hard work building a relationship that will fulfil the deepest part of a person’s being. It can be absolutely wonderful, but never without pain along the way.

We dream… But dreams don’t usually include hard graft and deep disappointments.

As a youngster I stood beside our town’s rugby pitch watching players running, tackling, kicking, catching lineout ball, and rucking players aside to get the ball from a loose scrum. It looked fun, and I dreamed of when I’d play rugby. A few years later I was playing, but being buried under a mauling heap of overweight bodies wasn’t fun. And being raked back by an opponent’s studs hurt. It hurt a lot. But that was rugby.

So, is it better not to dream? I might have made you think so. But we must dream, must hope, must strive, if we are ever to attain. Dreaming is the starting point for the greatest achievements. Life holds marvellous opportunities and experiences, and we mustn’t retreat away from our dreams. Just let your dreams really be your dreams, aware that the journey to that dream will have pain as well as joy.

And, what was the real issue for the swimmer in Tom Houston’s story? It wasn’t ‘Who pushed me in?’ The real issue was ‘Now that I’m in, how do I get to the far end of the pool?’ And he did.

And we can. Dream – work hard – persevere – enjoy – be fulfilled. Absolutely possible.