Zeal

Before he met Jesus, Ravan worked as a paid assailant for the RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization in India. For seven years, Ravan relished his role as a hired thug. After the death of his father when Ravan was 15-years-old, he was ripe for the RSS’ recruitment to persecute Christians. The RSS trained him to find Christian farmers, beat them, and hand them over to police. Ravan says he felt powerful and happy for the sense of purpose, national pride, and camaraderie.

But the Lord was preparing his heart for a much deeper purpose. His mother, who had become a Christian years earlier, earnestly prayed for her son to meet Jesus. Ravan said, “Ever since I was small, I used to tell her to pray quietly. Sometimes I would wear headphones to drown out the sound of her praying.” But after a near-fatal motorcycle accident, his RSS friends abandoned him. His mother was the only person who stood by him. When his mother invited him to church, he balked, especially considering the suffering he had caused the Christian community. But the pastor surprised Ravan with gentleness and love.

Ravan soon trusted in Jesus, married a Christian woman, and together they planted a church. He said, “I saw how I had been in my old life and how I lived now. I felt a burden within me to do something in return for God.” Six months after his newfound faith in Christ, his former RSS friends started persecuting him.

Ravan expects more persecution in the future, but he also says,

There’s a lot of zeal within me that no matter what comes. We face a lot of persecution, but when I read the Bible and pray, I have experienced God speak to me. I have learned that persecution is a part of the Christian faith. But I am determined to never turn back from my ministry. God gave me new life, so it doesn’t matter even if I die.

Every sport involves some level of risk. But the greatest risk must be faced by those in motorsports. In an interview with Sports History Weekly, Mario Andretti was asked the following question, “What makes a talented race car driver?” Is it fearlessness, reaction, judgment, or strategy? As the only race car driver to win the Daytona 500, Indianapolis 500, and the Formula One World Championship, fearlessness, reaction, judgment, and strategy are all talents that Andretti has in abundance. So, which one is the most important? He said, “All of the above.”

But then he added this, “. . . plus burning desire and confidence. I say burning desire because of the risk involved. If you want something so badly, you have a burning desire to do it, then you aren’t distracted by fear or risk or anything else.”

The Bookseller magazine runs a competition to find the book with the oddest title of the year. Competition rules stipulate that the work had to be of serious intent and non-fiction. One year, the winner was “Highlights in the History of Concrete.” Runners up included “The Illustrated History of Metal Lunchboxes,” and “The Development of Brain and Behavior in the Chicken.” Special mention was given to “Soviet Bus Stops,” and “Butchering Livestock at Home.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is amazing what interests people enough to spend the time and energy to write a book! Why should people be passionate about metal lunchboxes? As Christians, we should be passionate about what God has done for us. Are we passionate enough to pass it on to others? The Apostle Peter says, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15)

In his book “The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy,” Timothy Keller recalls the following:

Years ago, I read an old fairy tale about a wicked witch who lived in a remote cottage in the deep forest. When travelers came through looking for lodging, she offered them a meal and a bed. It was the most wonderfully comfortable bed any of them had ever felt. But it was a bed full of deep magic, and if you were asleep in it when the sun came up you would turn to stone. Then you became a figure in the witch’s statuary, trapped until the end of time. The witch forced a young girl to serve her, and though she had no power to resist the witch, the girl had become more and more filled with pity for her victims.

One day a young man came looking for bed and board and was taken in. The servant girl could not bear to see him turned to stone. So she threw sticks, stones, and thistles into his bed. It made the bed horribly uncomfortable. Every time he turned he felt a new painful object under him. Though he cast each one out, there was always a new one to dig into his flesh. He slept only fitfully and rose feeling weary and worn, long before dawn. As he walked out the front door, the servant girl met him, and he berated her cruelly. “How could you give a traveler such a terrible bed full of sticks and stones?” He cried and went on his way. “Ah,” she said under her breath, “the misery you know now is nothing like the infinitely greater misery a comfortable sleep would have brought upon you! Those were my sticks and stones of love.”

Keller continues: God puts sticks and stones of love in our beds to wake us up, to bring us to rely on him, lest the end of history or of life overtake us without the Lord in our heart, and we be turned to stone.

Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, once referenced what he called the "counter-intuitive phenomena of Jewish history"—a phenomena that applies to Christians as well. "When it was hard to be a Jew," Sacks wrote, "people stayed Jewish. When it was easy to be a Jew, people stopped being Jewish. Globally, this is the major Jewish problem of our time."

The Declaration of Independence was signed by fifty-six men. In signing this document, they put their lives and their fortunes on the line. Treason was the word the British would use to describe what they did. Many of them lost everything.

Thomas Nelson Jr. was one of these men. Nelson was wealthy. He often paid for, or lent the money to buy the munitions that George Washington's men desperately needed. During the Battle of Yorktown, British General Cornwallis took over Nelson's home as his headquarters. It was not just a move for Cornwallis' comfort, or to make a symbolic point as to who was in charge. It was a strategic defensive move. The British general knew that that Washington's men would never open fire on the grand estate of their great friend and benefactor, Thomas Nelson.

However Nelson saw the predicament General Washington was in, and how the cannons were not even pointed in the direction of the enemy's headquarters. Nelson quietly went up to Washington and urged him to open the canon fire on his own home—now Cornwallis new headquarters. Washington did open fire and the home was destroyed.

In his book Deep Work, author Cal Newport provides an example of excellence—a blacksmith from Wisconsin named Ric Furrer. Furrer specializes in ancient and medieval metalworking practices, which he painstakingly re-creates in his shop, Door County Forgeworks. A PBS documentary shows Furrer trying to re-create a Viking-era sword. He begins by using a fifteen-hundred-year-old technique to smelt crucible steel. The result is an ingot, which must then be shaped and polished into a long and elegant sword blade. "This part, the initial breakdown, is terrible," Furrer says as he methodically heats the ingot, hits it with a hammer, turns it, hits it, then puts it back in the flames to start over. It takes eight hours of this hammering to complete the shaping.

It's clear that he's not drearily whacking at the metal like a miner with a pickaxe: Every hit, though forceful, is carefully controlled. He peers intently at the metal, turning it just so for each impact. "You have to be very gentle with it or you will crack it," he explains. "You have to nudge it; slowly it breaks down; then you start to enjoy it." At one point, he lifts the sword, red with heat, as he strides swiftly toward a pipe filled with oil and plunges in the blade to cool it. After a moment of relief that the blade did not crack into pieces—a common occurrence at this step—Furrer pulls it from the oil. Furrer holds the burning sword up above his head with a single powerful arm and stares at it a moment before blowing out the fire. He says, "To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make. And it's that challenge that drives me. I don't need a sword. But I have to make them."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Excellence; Commitment; Work; Labor—doing our work as unto the Lord. (2) Sanctification; Spiritual Growth; Spiritual disciplines—putting time and effort into our spiritual growth, which is never a short and easy process.

Any given day, 23,000 scheduled flights take off and land at American airports. At any given time, 5,000 of those airplanes are simultaneously airborne. That means that approximately one million people are flying 300 mph at 30,000 feet at any given moment.

A hundred years ago, this was the stuff of science fiction. Then two brothers, Wilbur and Orville, turned science fiction into science fact. The Wright brothers' dream of flying traces back to an autumn day in 1878 when their father, a pastor and church leader, brought home a rather unique toy. Using a rubber band to twirl its rotor, a miniature bamboo helicopter flew into the air. Much like our mechanized toy helicopters, it broke after a few flights. But instead of giving up on it and going on to the next toy, the Wright brothers made their own.

And the dream of flying was conceived. A quarter century later, on December 17, 1903, Orville himself went airborne for twelve gravity-defying seconds in the first powered, piloted flight in history. It's almost impossible to imagine life as we know it without airplanes. But like every innovation, every revolution, every breakthrough, someone had to imagine the impossible first. Every dream has a genesis moment. It usually starts small—as small as a toy helicopter. But the chain reaction of faith defies gravity, defies the imagination. Without knowing it, the Wright brothers were creating the airline industry, the FAA, and the TSA. I'm sure it never crossed their minds, but their flying faith is the reason why a million people are speeding through the troposphere right now. It was two pastor's kids, Wilbur and Orville, who punched your ticket with their possibility thinking.

For her role in Black Swan, Natalie Portman trained with New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers for eight hours a day, six days a week for the 12 months before the film started shooting.

For his role in My Left Foot, Daniel Day-Lewis interacted with disabled patients at the Sanymount School Clinic in Dublin, Ireland. Between takes during filming, he remained in his wheelchair and was spoon-fed and carried around by the crew.

For his role in The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio plunged in and out of icy rivers, ate raw buffalo meat, and slept in a simulated horse carcass.

For his role in the film Fury, Shia LeBeouf trained with the U.S. National Guard and was a chaplain's assistant in the 41st Infantry. During the filming, he didn't bathe for 4 months.

To better imitate Ray Charles, Jamie Foxx wore prosthetic eyelids, leaving him blind for most of each day. Occasionally, he was inadvertently left alone on a set, the crew forgetting he was blind. He also learned all the piano parts and lost 30 pounds in one week for the role.

For her role as Fantine in Les Misérables, Anne Hathaway shaved her head, lost 25 pounds and subsisted on a daily diet of two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste.

To play a drug addict in Jungle Fever, Halle Berry visited a real crack den and got to know the addicts. During filming, she abstained from bathing for ten days.

In his role for The Pianist, Adrien Brody familiarized himself with despair and hunger. He moved to Europe, bringing only two suitcases of personal belongings and living a meager lifestyle. He lost 30 pounds and took piano and dialect lessons. Brody said: "There is an emptiness that comes with really starving that I hadn't experienced. I couldn't have acted that without knowing it. I've experienced loss, I've experienced sadness in my life, but I didn't know the desperation that comes with hunger."

According to one story (which may be a legend), in the late 1960s, the now-iconic investor Warren Buffet pried seed money for his very first stock fund from eleven doctors who'd agreed to kick in $105,000. Then, in a symbolic act of his own commitment, Buffet added $100 of his own money to the kitty. No one knows exactly when the phrase "skin in the game" entered the American lingo, but many pinned it on Buffet's willingness to plunk down his own $100. The now common phrase captures the essence of an investment of heart and courage and risk, not the mere investment of money.

The idea is simple: You have no business asking others to trust you with their money if you're not willing to put your own resources at risk. If you have no "skin in the game," no stake of vulnerability, then your engagement is distant and rhetorical rather than personal and visceral. We might play fast and loose with others' resources but not with our own. Put another way, it's one thing to work for an entrepreneur; it's quite another to be the entrepreneur. The first involves little personal investment; the second demands our heart, our time, our sacrifice, our Commitment, some real "skin."

In the 2013 film, Gravity, Dr. Ryan Stone, played by Sandra Bullock, is a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission, with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky, played by Georg Clooney. On a routine spacewalk, the shuttle is destroyed by a freak hail of space debris, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone. According to one description of the film, "They are tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness. The deafening silence tells them they have lost any link to Earth ... and any chance for rescue. As fear turns to panic, every gulp of air eats away at what little oxygen is left. But the only way home may be to go further out into the terrifying expanse of space."

After the film's release, the German magazine Der Spiegel asked 69-year-old German astronaut Ulrich Walter to fact-check the film. Walter said that after becoming completely untethered, Sandra Bullock's character would have died. The interviewer commented, "That doesn't sound like a very nice way to go, drifting through nothingness in a spacesuit, waiting to die."

But Ulrich replied, "When you're slowly running out of oxygen, the same thing happens as does when you're in thin air at the top of a mountain: Everything seems funny. And as you're laughing about it, you slowly nod off. I experienced this phenomenon in an altitude chamber during my training as an astronaut. At some point, someone in the group starts cracking bad jokes … A person who dies alone in space dies a cheerful death." In other words, your situation is hopeless, you're slowly dying, but you think it's funny.

Possible Preaching Angles: Is it possible that our entire culture is, in many ways, cut off from our spiritual oxygen supply, "drifting through nothingness, waiting to die" and yet "everything seems funny"? Is this an example of what Neil Postman called "amusing ourselves to death"?

On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy (unofficially known as "Superstorm Sandy") slammed into the coast of the Northeastern United States. The Category 2 storm became the largest Atlantic hurricane on record (as measured by diameter, with winds spanning 1,100 miles. Experts estimate that the storm's monetary damages topped $68 billion. At least 286 people were killed along the path of the storm in seven countries.

As Hurricane Sandy bore down on New York City, almost everything shut down—except at least one rogue Starbucks near Times Square. Desperate (addicted?) but highly committed Starbucks junkies fought high winds, dangerous rains, and dire warnings just to get a latte or a cup of coffee. Bethany Owings, 28, walked 10 blocks with her one-year-old daughter for a fix. "I saw on Facebook that they were open," she said. "It was scary not having Starbucks." Her neighbor and friend 29-year-old Chris Hernandez came along and later said, "When she said they were open, I was like, 'Pack the baby up. Let's go!' I didn't know they were all going to close. I started panicking. There's nothing else I would've gone out for. This makes my day complete." Alex Mwangi, 25, walked more than 20 blocks looking for an open Starbucks. He told reporters, "It took half an hour. But I'm a Starbucks fanatic. I go four or five times a day." David Low, also 25, said he went to three closed Starbucks before learning the store was open. Low said, "I'm really happy these guys are open. I can't get a pumpkin spice latte anywhere else. The 10-minute wait was worth it."

Possible Preaching Angles: Value; Worship; Christ—People will make sacrifices for what they value. If we value Christ, we will lay down our lives for him. The people in this true news story were nuts, but you have to say that they weren't lukewarm or uncommitted about following their deep desire for a pumpkin spice latte. Like Paul and Epaphroditus in Philippians 2, they risked it all to pursue what they valued.

As a winter storm rolled over Birmingham, Alabama on January 28th 2014, Dr. Zenko Hrynkiw heard that a patient at Trinity Medical Center had taken a turn for the worse. The patient needed surgery, no other surgeon was available, and the patient had a 90 percent chance of dying. Driving wasn't an option because of the snow and ice. Emergency personnel were busy.

So the 62-year-old doctor faced these brute facts and proceeded to take action. He put a coat over his hospital scrubs and started walking six miles in the snow from Brookwood Medical Center to Trinity Medical Center. Along the way, he fell and rolled down a hill, but he got back up. He helped some drivers who were stuck in the snow. He finally arrived at Trinity, performed the surgery, and probably saved a patient's life.

In a later press conference that praised his efforts, Dr. Zenko Hrynkiw wondered what all the fuss was about. He said, "It really wasn't that big of a deal." Any good doctor would have done the same thing, Hrynkiw said. The patient was dying and, he said, "that wasn't going to happen on my shift."

But a hospital official said the doctor was being modest. Keith Granger, Trinity Medical Center's CEO, said, "It was not just a walk in the park. Given the conditions, the temperatures and the terrain, it's a remarkable physical feat and mental feat. And we have an individual alive today who wouldn't be here if not for his efforts."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Dedication; Commitment; Discipleship; Worship—If only followers of Jesus had this level of commitment to follow Christ, worship Christ, and make him known to others; (2) Faith and Works—This reflects the zeal for good works that should be seen in those who know Christ.

The Christian scholar Larry Taunton launched a nationwide campaign to interview college students who belong to atheistic campus groups. After receiving a flood of enquiries, Larry and his team heard one consistent theme from these young unbelievers: they often expected but didn't find more spiritual depth from their Christian neighbors. Larry writes:

Some [of these young atheists] had gone to church hoping to find answers to [tough questions about faith]. Others hoped to find answers to questions of personal significance, purpose, and ethics. Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: "I really started to get bored with church."

In contrast, these young atheists expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously. Larry writes,

Without fail, our former church-attending students expressed [positive] feelings for those Christians who unashamedly embraced biblical teaching. Michael, a political science major at Dartmouth, told us, "I really can't consider a Christian a good, moral person if he isn't trying to convert me …. Christianity is something that if you really believed it, it would change your life and you would want to change [the lives] of others. I haven't seen too much of that."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Worship; Preaching—Surprisingly, many young atheists aren't looking for Christians who will water-down the faith. They want us to worship and preach with wholehearted devotion. (2) Commitment; Zeal; Discipleship—This story shows what lukewarm discipleship looks like to the watching world—it's blah. (3) Evangelism—These young atheists want and expect us to share our faith—assuming that it's done in an appropriate way.

In October of 1781, General Cornwallis marched his British troops into Yorktown. The patriots to the south had wreaked havoc on his redcoat army, and he was hoping to rendezvous with the British Navy on Chesapeake Bay.

American and French troops, however, anticipating Cornwallis's plan, pounded them with cannon fire, while the French fleet cut off escape by sea. The British found themselves trapped.

Thomas Nelson, then governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was fighting with the patriots firing the cannons in Yorktown. Gathering the men, he pointed to a beautiful brick home. "That is my home," he explained. "It is the best one in town. And, because of that, Lord Cornwallis has almost certainly set up the British headquarters inside."

And he told the American artillerymen to open fire on his own house.

They did. As the story goes, the very first cannonball shot at Mr. Nelson's house sailed right through the large dining room window and landed on the table where several British officers were eating.

It is one thing for a man to talk about freedom. It is quite another to destroy his own home to help make that freedom a reality. Nelson understood, however, that to hold on to his current life would mean forfeiting the life he was so desperately seeking. A life of true freedom would cost him the stuff of his present life. It was a small price to pay.

On October 19, as the British troops surrendered, the Redcoat band played the song, "The World Turned Upside Down." The song was apt. The world's greatest super-power had just been defeated by an army that couldn't afford to put shoes on its soldiers' feet.

But how can you thwart an army willing to sacrifice everything they currently have, for something infinitely better waiting on the other side?

Jim Caviezel (whose initials are JC) was thirty-three when he played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. Caviezel has said his faith is his guide, both personally and professionally, and that God "called" him to the acting profession. Before casting the actor to play Jesus, Mel Gibson (the film's producer and director) told the up-and-coming actor that the role might cost him his career.

But Caviezel, a confessing Christian, wanted to honor his Lord by portraying his life and death. Caviezel responded to Gibson, "We all have a cross to carry. I have to carry my own cross. If we don't carry our crosses, we are going to be crushed under the weight of it."

As it has turned out, Caviezel's decision to "carry the cross of Christ" has definitely cost him career opportunities. Following his role in The Passion of the Christ, Caviezel's credits have been anything but impressive. He starred in the little-known thriller Unknown, had a supporting role in the Denzel Washington's film Deja Vu, and had the leading roles in Outlander, and The Stoning of Soraya M—both of which were panned by the critics.

Not until the fall of 2011 did Caviezel land a part that resulted in a positive buzz. His role in the CBS television series Person of Interest has been well-received.

Caviezel said he doesn't worry about the career price he paid with that film—a global box-office smash that led to fewer, not more, film offers for him. "The awards, the hall of fame" that actors get into here on Earth, he said, don't matter to him. His reward, he said, will come in heaven. Caviezel said, "Jesus is as controversial now as he has ever been. Not much has changed in 2,000 years …. We have to give up our names, our reputations, and our lives to speak the truth."

In their book The Privilege of Persecution, Carl Moeller and David Hegg tell the following story about a courageous believer who has helped their ministry (Open Doors USA) smuggle Bibles and commentaries into North Korea.

The Yalu and Tumen Rivers form a naturally meandering boundary between The People's Republic of China and The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea …. Night and day, soldiers from both armies stare vigilantly at each other through high-powered field glasses as they control traffic in and out of their respective countries. Those approaching the Chinese checkpoints find that travel moves at a snail's pace, for each is high risk and high security, and very few people are allowed to cross the heavily fortified border regularly. Behind the Korean border, the situation is not much different. There are checkpoints everywhere. Traveling inside North Korea is almost impossible.

But one man does go around the country. To those of us in the West, he is known only as "The Traveler." He is one of the persons who helps distribute goods inside North Korea. Despite the ever-present danger of exposure, The Traveler remains an unpretentious and simple man. He looks more like a blue-collar factory worker than the Korean James Bond, but that's one of the keys to his success. He's adept at blending in, remaining both vigilant and decisive.

It's a matter of survival.

He has served Open Doors for years, and yet we don't even know his real name. We never will. The fewer people who know it, the better, for if his secret work on behalf of God's people were ever to be discovered, it would mean a brutal death sentence for him.

When [our] leaders spoke to him, we asked him what the church in North Korea prays for. This ostensibly emotionless man who puts his life on the line every day—often for people he's never even met living in cities he's never visited—began to weep.

He told of a church movement that has remained underground ever since the fifties. In order to wipe Christianity from the face of the land, Kim II-sung's soldiers herded entire congregations into the streets and ran them over with bulldozers. Thousands of men, women, and children—nearly all of them North Korean citizens—were literally crushed to death, their remains … used to line roadbeds throughout the surrounding cities.

Today, under Kim's son Kim Jon-il, there are [around] 240,000 believers, direct descendants of those who were left behind …. [These] North Korean believers are prayerfully focused on one purpose: to be in place and fulfill God's will for their lives. Their prayer is a prayer for liberation, for lifting of the darkness, for a possibility to reopen the churches of their ancestors, and for reconciliation ….

So despite the dangers, The Traveler continues to [risk his life in order to] equip believers with commentaries, Bibles, radio resources, training, and encouragement to keep them focused on the Lord.

Science writer Winifred Gallagher argues that what we call boredom (which she defines as "the unpleasant sense that there is nothing that interests you"), is largely a recent problem that still doesn't exist in many places around the globe. She writes:

Situations that would strike us as unbearably dull, say, waiting for hours or even days for a bus, are considered just the way life is in many developing countries. Anthropologist Henry Harpending has done extensive fieldwork in the back country of [Africa], where in most ways, he says, "folks are just like you and me. But one thing that the Westerners that go there just can't understand and are open-mouthed about is the people's tolerance for tedium. They can just sit all day under the trees …." [Harpending] is fluent in Bushman and he has tried for twenty years to elicit a word for boredom, but the closest he has gotten is the unsatisfactory [word for] tired.

Gallagher also adds, "[In the English language] boredom has no derivation: That is, it doesn't come from any other word but was specially created. Moreover, the word didn't appear in English until the later eighteenth century."

It's no secret that procrastination has a high price tag: it costs money, it undermines relationships, and it lowers job performance. In recent years, numerous psychologists have studied the prevalence and consequences of procrastination. The following facts provide an overview of some of the more interesting findings about this research:

• About 15-20 percent of adults are regular procrastinators.
• About 80-95 percent of college students are considered procrastinators.
• Many Americans don't have enough money for their retirement because of putting off saving during their working life.
• The Oregon Health and Science University tested several thousand people's level of cholesterol. Of the 19,800 who tested for high cholesterol, 35 percent did not see a doctor for at least 5 months.
• A University of Windsor in Ontario study found that procrastinators had higher stress levels and more household accidents than non-procrastinators.
• The vast majority of procrastinators—95 percent—want to end their habit but can't. One psychologist said: "Habits become non-conscious brain processes. When procrastination becomes chronic, a person is essentially running on autopilot."

In January 2006, author Randy Alcorn had the opportunity to join with Jim Elliot's family for a dinner that marked the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jim and four other missionaries in Ecuador. Randy writes:

There we met Jim's older brother, Bert, and his wife Colleen. In 1949, years before Jim went to Ecuador, they became missionaries to Peru. When we discussed their ministry, Bert smiled and said, "I can't wait to get back from furlough." Now in their eighties, they are in their sixtieth year as missionaries, joyfully reaching people for Christ. Until that weekend I didn't know anything about them. Bert and Colleen may enter eternity under the radar of the church at large, but not under God's ….

Bert said something to me that day that I'll never forget: "Jim and I both served Christ, but differently. Jim was a great meteor, streaking through the sky." Bert didn't go on to describe himself, but I will. Unlike his brother Jim, Bert is a faint star that rises night after night, faithfully crossing the same path in the sky to God's glory. I believe Jim Elliot's reward is considerable, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that Bert and Colleen's will be greater still.