Serve, not solve.
What Speaker Mike Johnson told us inside the Capitol chapel.
Most of you know that I serve as the Executive Director of an organization called Them Before Us. Our mission is to defend every child’s right to be known and loved by their mother and father, which means we often get involved in policy issues ranging from marriage and divorce, to IVF and surrogacy. Our goal is simple: we believe all of society should be pro-child, around the ideal of every child’s right to be raised by their married mother and father.
Although most of our political work happens in state legislatures across the country, we regularly head up to D.C. for meetings with leaders there as well. Of all the times I’ve been to D.C., though, this past week was by far the most meaningful. We received a special invitation to attend a private tour of the Capitol led by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
The purpose of the tour was to learn more about the spiritual heritage of the nation, and specifically to see for ourselves some of the Christian legacy woven through the Capitol Building itself.
It was an amazing trip, one I could several articles on, but I want to focus on one specific part of it. Somewhere around the middle of the tour, Speaker Johnson led us into a small chapel, this room had a vibrant stained glass window depicting General Washington kneeling in prayer. The inscription on the glass reads, “Preserve me, O God, for in thee do I put my trust” (Psalm 16:1). As the Speaker described the stained glass, he shared what that image has meant to him: a standing reminder that it is in God that we put our hopes and trust, and that without Him, this whole national experiment would never have been possible.
Then he shared one particularly poignant story, which I’ll relay in general terms, rather than try to quote his exact words. He shared that he had been fighting for a large piece of legislation, wrangling all of the different members and factions, and had hit a complete impasse. It felt hopeless. His mind went back to the chapel, to the stained glass, to Washington, and he realized he had not yet spent time praying for a breakthrough. He knew how absurd that would look to the watching world. With everything on the line, shouldn’t the Speaker of the House be lobbying, whipping votes, working the phones? But over his time in leadership (and throughout his life) he had come to believe that what appeared like inactivity to others was actually the most active thing he could do. Moments like that, he reflected, force us to remember that God is the sovereign; that our efforts only take us so far; that while we are ultimately and always accountable for putting in the work, God is the one who ultimately delivers the results. And if we truly believe He is sovereign, we can rest assured that so long as we do all He has called us to do, He will take care of the rest. It wasn’t long after those prayers that they had their breakthrough, one the Speaker attributes to God moving and changing hearts.
After we left the chapel, Speaker Johnson took us to National Statuary Hall, the old House chamber where members once sat at their desks. He told us about John Quincy Adams, the only president who ever went back to serve in the House after leaving the White House. Adams went back because of how much he hated slavery, and day after day he stood at his desk and pressed the case for abolition, so relentlessly that it was almost expected of him daily, like a diatribe. Adams died in that very building without ever seeing slavery end. But then the Speaker pointed across the room to a spot where another congressman once sat and listened to that daily speech from the former president. That man was Abraham Lincoln, a young congressman from Illinois.
Adams may have died feeling like a failure on that issue, never having seen abolition come to the nation he cared so much about. A better perspective, though, one I think Speaker Johnson would agree with, is taking the long view. Even though Adams did not effect all of the change he hoped to see in his lifetime, by trusting God to be faithful, he said all of the things God called him to say, and no doubt left an imprint on the man God had called to pick up the torch. That man, Lincoln, would years later emancipate the slaves.
It’s honestly a great spiritual principle because it is how Jesus himself operated.
It’s crazy to think that where Jesus walked, there were still people who went hungry. There were probably people sick and blind who lived next door to Jesus at points in his life. Sometimes we imagine that everywhere he went, everyone had all their problems solved and every need met, and that’s simply not true. He healed blind men who would lose their sight again in old age. He fed five thousand people who were hungry again the next morning. It’s so helpful to pause and remember that even Lazarus, whom he raised from the dead, eventually went back into the grave.
If we hang our hat on outcomes, on progress in the broken world around us, we may grade ourselves as failures. We may even be tempted to grade Christ as one during different points of his ministry on earth. But that’s not how Christ functioned. You can recount moments throughout his life when people asked him to do something or to go somewhere, and he responded that it wasn’t his time yet, or that it wasn’t in the Father’s will. He was seemingly unconcerned with doing the things the world around him would consider to have the greatest impact; instead he was narrowly focused on being in the places, and doing the specific things, God had called him to.
We have to wrestle with the fact that he did not call us to solve. He called us to serve.
Look, I get this wrong myself. I run a nonprofit, which means I live in a world of metrics and scorecards; I report to donors on the breakthroughs we’ve had. I am constantly measuring, and that’s a dangerous game. Speaker Johnson reminded me of that. The effort is ours. The results are God’s.
I’ll close with one final story… a letter between two spiritual heroes of the faith.
In February of 1791, John Wesley lay days from death. The last letter he ever wrote went to a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce, who had taken up the cause of abolition. Wesley did not tell him the arc of history was on his side. He told him the truth:
Dear Sir,
Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it…
Your affectionate servant, John Wesley
Wesley is saying plainly: without God, you will lose. Not “it’s going to be difficult,” or “harder without Him.” but “you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils.” Notice the size of his prayer: he does not merely ask that Wilberforce win the vote in front of him, but that he go on until slavery itself, even across the ocean in America, vanishes from the earth.
Wesley knew, and Wilberforce would learn, that the fight would come in increments. Sixteen years after that letter, in 1807, Parliament abolished the slave trade, making it illegal for British ships to buy, sell, and transport human beings. It was a monumental victory, and it freed no one. Every man, woman, and child already enslaved across the British colonies remained property under the law. So Wilberforce kept going, through failing health and even after retiring from Parliament, for another twenty-six years, until the summer of 1833, when word reached his deathbed that the bill abolishing slavery itself was finally assured of passage. He died three days later. Wesley never saw either victory. Wilberforce barely saw the second. Adams never saw his at all. But that’s okay. The work was the privilege they were called to do; the results were on God’s divine schedule and timing.
You see, our assignment is faithfulness. To serve, not solve. It is not an idle trust. It is an exhausting and active faith. And at the end of the day, at the end of ourselves, spent in a worthy cause, we can rest easy knowing we have played exactly the part we were called to play.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
