The scene on Mount Carmel was dramatic—hundreds of priests wailing, dancing, even bleeding. The priests of Baal spent all day trying to get their imaginary god to consume their sacrifice with fire from heaven. But no deity answered. By evening, Elijah built his own altar, set a sacrifice on it, doused it with water, and even surrounded the altar with a trench full of water (likely to prove that the fire wasn’t already built into his altar somehow). After this, he uttered a short, fervent prayer—yet it was calm by comparison to the pagan priests’ prayers and gyrations. If you time the prayer as recorded in 1 Kings 18:36-37, it takes just under 20 seconds to utter. And after that, fire descended from heaven and consumed his sacrifice—and every bit of the altar.
What a dramatic miracle, performed after a short prayer.
Herbert W. Armstrong, when going through a severe set of trials and urgently in need of some immediate miracles, wrote about that prayer: “[T]he awe-inspiring answer came crashing from heaven instantly! Elijah did not need to talk God into it by a long prayer, or by repeated prayers. But I knew that Elijah at that moment was close to God—that he had previously been spending hours in long prayers to be in contact and close communion with His Maker! And he naturally knew His Maker would answer!” (Autobiography, Vol. 1).
One of the lessons here is that this “20-second miracle moment” was not just the product of 20 seconds of effort. It’s easy to look at the 20-second prayer and think that’s all the preparation we need in life for the big moments. But that 20-second prayer was on top of hours, days, weeks, months and years already spent building a relationship with God. Almost certainly, Elijah had prayed to God earlier that day in a longer, more substantial, private session. He likely had offered silent prayers throughout that day. He wasn’t talking to God for the first time that evening on Mount Carmel.
Humanly, we like immediate answers and results with very little time investment. Proverbs 12:12 says: “The wicked desireth the net [or the spoil] of evil men: but the root of the righteous yieldeth fruit.” The righteous put down roots, grow and bear fruit—which takes time. Carnally, however, we want to skip to the end—to the spoil of those who got something for nothing.
How many movies are about someone who shirks responsibility their whole life only to realize at the end that he needs to get his act together, and then the night before, changes his entire persona, attitude and way of doing things? He’s a different man—overnight.
For young people, this human tendency often manifests itself in the kinds of students they are. It’s easy for us to save everything to the last minute, put forth a stress-filled last-ditch effort, usually sacrificing a good night’s sleep, and hope that we have a “20-second miracle moment.” In other words, we cram. And the idea that it will bring good results is just as fictitious as the men in those movies.
It’s easy to fixate on the 20-second prayer, the immediate miracle, the final bailout, the bag of loot, and ignore the fact that real achievement takes many hours spread over many days, weeks and months. It’s easy to look for the bottom-of-the-ninth, 10-seconds-left-on-the-clock victory. So we put off the reading assignments, the memorization work, the speech preparation, the rehearsals and the papers until the night before. And instead of an “Elijah” miracle, we get—well—what we deserve: A sleepless night where our exhausted and infertile brains can’t process any more information anyway, and we do really no better on the assignment than we would have if we had just gone to sleep and let our brains process what they already know.
Here in the United States, we are still toward the beginning of a semester. What better time to resolve to use the entire semester to prepare sufficiently for all your academic endeavors? If you put the time in this way, you’ll be surprised at how little you have to do at the bottom of the ninth—or with 10, let’s say 20, seconds left on the clock. And you can actually set yourself up for a relatively stress-free 20-second miracle moment!
God Doesn’t Cram
Think about what God is doing with man: bringing children into His Family. With everything else God created, He did it by fiat— a Latin word meaning “let there be.” God said, “Let there be light” (fiat lux), and there was light. Sounds immediate, doesn’t it?
Notice this quote from Mr. Armstrong: “After much prayer about it to learn God’s will, I was allowed to build the finest modern auditorium on this Earth—the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, Calif. But I did much thinking and planning …. We were 12 years thinking out, designing, and putting into actual plans and blueprints this auditorium before even breaking ground. Every cubic inch of the auditorium was designed on paper before a single cubic inch went into production. How much more, then, must the great God and the Word have thought out, planned, and designed in their minds, before the actual creation?” (The Incredible Human Potential, emphasis added).
Leading up to that fiat lux moment, God had planned how it would all work—it wasn’t a well, let’s see how this looks if I turn the lights on moment.
Isaiah 66:8 reads: “Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.”
A time is coming soon when an entire nation of God beings will burst on the scene. But that is most certainly not a fiat moment. That moment is preceded by a great deal of preparation. “Such perfect spiritual and holy character cannot be created by fiat. It must be developed, and that requires time and experience” (ibid).
God doesn’t cram the development of character—it takes, on average, nearly a human lifetime for each person He works with. Isaiah 65:20 says He will give people 100 years in a future time period known as the “great white throne judgment” to build this character. (Similarly, we can’t cram our character development or put that off till the last minute.)
Godly character in a human being is God’s masterpiece—and He knows it takes years of working and perfecting.
Even His overall plan of 7,000 years can’t be put off and compressed into a few short years. God didn’t wait for 2015 to throw everything together—give the Ten Commandments in January, send Christ in the flesh to be tortured and murdered a couple weeks later, and then start a Church and get the message on a web channel or something for a couple months and then put Satan away sometime in the summer and have a great couple weeks where the animals are tame and everyone’s happy, and then resurrect 100 billion people.
But what about us with our studies or projects? Are we better than God? If the all-powerful God won’t work that way, can we pitiful dust clods outdo Him with our last-minute efforts?
Learning Takes Time
Great success at anything takes time. The second law of success, as Mr. Armstrong defined it, is preparation and education.
In his booklet The Seven Laws of Success, he wrote: ““[T]he dumb animals have a certain advantage over us. They do not have to learn. They never need to weary their brains with book learning.” Aside from learning tricks or patterns of behavior, they’re born with the instinct to know what to do. A calf doesn’t take a year or two to walk. The eagle doesn’t plan out a different nest construction each time, or try to mimic the crow’s nest; eagles have built the same kind of nests they’ve made since God created eagles.
“We don’t come to these basic accomplishments instinctively and immediately like dumb animals. It may take a little more time. It may come a little harder” (ibid). Yet, how often do we act as though we do have instinct: Oh, I’ll figure it out. Or, the reverse: Well, I’m just not good at that, so I won’t worry about it. We expect ourselves to operate like a dumb calf—on instinct, instead of really learning what God intended for us to learn—to push ourselves over time to become better and better.
Or we put it on God: God will help it all come together. Not only is that taking God for granted, it is working against His fundamental intent for our growth! If we prepare properly, He will help it come together by building on what we’ve already worked on diligently.
Mr. Armstrong said successful people generally “were broad enough to realize that education included not only book learning, but personality development, leadership, experience, knowledge from contacts and associations, and from observation” (ibid).
You can’t cram that. Certain things you simply will not know until you are older, and you won’t even know that you don’t know them—not because you lack intelligence, but because you lack experience. You haven’t spent enough time alive yet. It takes time for something to grow and mature.
Head knowledge is the same way.
To have a garden bear fruit in the spring (here in the Northern Hemisphere), we have to plant things in February. That’s not a month we typically think about things growing in the ground, but that’s how early you have to start if you want a spring harvest. You can’t say, Well, God, help these seeds to grow really fast because it’s April, and I didn’t have time to plant in February. God wants us to be planners and forward thinkers.
Prepare for the Lightning Bolt
Our human nature thinks we can put things off and get last-minute “whiffs of inspiration”—the proverbial lightning bolt of an idea that causes everything to come together in the very end.
Geoff Colvin talked about this in Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else. “The evidence … shows that in finding creative solutions to problems, knowledge—the more the better—is your friend, not your enemy. And it shows that creativity isn’t a lightning bolt. … The greatest innovators … spent many years in intensive preparation before making any kind of creative breakthrough. Creativity never came suddenly … it always followed a long earlier period of extremely hard work. … Great innovations are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation.”
In a student’s case, consider how that “perfect topic” for your paper will not just come to you in a whiff of inspiration. It will take thought, time, study, research and experience.
Colvin’s research shows that great composers didn’t create their most notable master works until about 10 years into their creative endeavors. For painters, it was about six years. The greatest inventions weren’t a lightning bolt of an idea. The inventors were using the wealth of knowledge that already existed, or improving on something that already existed—the steam engine, the cotton gin, etc.
He quotes Jim Marggraff (creator of the LeapPad reading system), who said “the ‘aha’ moments grow out of hours of thought and study.” Colvin then quoted an influential Internet entrepreneur who said, “The idea of epiphany is a dreamer’s paradise where people want to believe that things are easier than they are.”
Again, greatness comes from time and experience—even more from how you use that time.
As a student this semester, if you put off the actual ingraining of information to the last minute, you’re only shoving it into your short-term memory. At that point, it doesn’t matter how great your school is, or how great the information is, or how great the teacher is. You’ve crammed it in a funnel only to keep it long enough to make it through a test.
Memory Storage Takes Time
If you plan the semester right, you’ll be amazed at how much you retain. Some think they have a bad memory. Did you know that, aside from an actual brain-related injury or illness, there is no such thing? There is, however, such thing as an untrained memory.
One of the best ways to encode information into long-term memory is called the spacing effect: spacing out your consumption and repetition of the information over time. When the repetition is separated by time—by periods of sleep—it’s like the brain stores it in more readily accessible file folders for retrieval later. This is great not only for reviewing notes, but also for working on papers or presentations that are due many weeks from now. Study and meditate on the material over a long period of time. Then in your final preparations, you’ll experience that “20-second miracle moment.”
Start Sharpening Your Ax Now
Mr. Armstrong’s Uncle Frank, who was advising him on whether to obtain higher education formally or on his own, said: “The reason we have to maintain schools and universities is simply that most people are too lazy—most lack the ambition and persistence, the drive—to procure an education outside of schools and colleges. Most people must have someone do their thinking and planning for them, assign lessons and homework, and force students to study and learn by a system of rewards and punishments in the form of grades, and finally, a sheepskin with a degree” (Autobiography of Herbert W. Armstrong, emphasis added).
Proverbs 21:5 reads: “The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of every one that is hasty only to want.” Thoughts in the Hebrew means devising, planning, meditating, purposing. The planning and purposing of those who are really on top of their game leads to “plenteousness”—meaning excellence, preeminence and superiority. That’s where greatness comes from, the Bible says! The New Living Translation renders it: “Good planning and hard work lead to prosperity, but hasty shortcuts lead to poverty.”
Even the Hebrew word for diligent in the King James Version refers to something sharp and effective. But to sharpen things takes time. Abraham Lincoln said if he had nine hours to cut down a tree, he’d spend eight sharpening his ax. So there is that last-minute effort where you do the actual hacking, but it’s preceded by so much more preparation. If we prepare properly, that tree should only take an hour to come down. But our human nature thinks, Well, we don’t have much time anymore, so let’s start hacking away.
In writing assignments, you’ll find that if you spend more time sharpening your ax (studying, reading, meditating on the material over a long period of time), then when you sit down to write, the material just flows out—and rather quickly at that!
So plan out your semester. Put in those hours of hard work. Space the repetitions and study sessions over the next several weeks. Prepare diligently. And experience the greatness of those 20-second miracle moments!