day 2411: Too Many Warriors

The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many warriors with you. If I let all of you fight the Midianites, the Israelites will boast to me that they saved themselves by their own strength.”

If you know me and you don’t live in the Bay Area, you are probably saying to yourself right now, “Yes, Rusty, Golden State has too many “Warriors” on their team.”  But alas, to that I cannot agree and not what I am writing about today. But, nice try (smile).  It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes we just get overstaffed and end up in a situation where we don’t have enough room for those who have extraordinary capacity to operate and fully lead. However, that issue doesn’t happen because we have hired too well and too strong, it happens because we don’t have a large enough vision and plan to grow.  Many will take offense to that statement as they stand behind their plans, which they should.  But, consider that like a sports team, the only way a team can be over-stacked with talent will be when they win every game, every year, which no one does.  So, just by that measure, we can’t have enough great talent on the floor and on the bench.  The same is true in our companies, organizations and teams, we can never have enough great talent. It is our own limitations of not thinking big and bold enough to give the extraordinary talent the room to have us grow.

God told Gideon that he was taking too many warriors and that he needed to shrink his battle force.  It wasn’t because he had too many men, it was because Gideon was leaning on the number of warriors to win the battle, versus remembering that he had God on his side.  In truth, Gideon probably could have asked God if it would be okay to send only one warrior to show all their enemies how powerful God could be, and God would have been pleased and done it.  What I take from this lesson is that in our workplaces where we might be battling to bring glory to God as our purpose, we can remember and trust that God never said there had to be multitudes to win our battles, He just asks us to depend on Him and allow His strength to battle us through.

Reference: Judges 7:2 (New Living Translation)

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