Of all the leaders I have ever known, Dr. Bill Bright, the founder and president of Cru, was the easiest for me to follow.  I think it’s because I love to follow joy!  Whenever I ever heard him speak, two things became apparent and found their way straight to my heart.  His continuous call for us to search our hearts for any sense of leaving our first love, and then the way he pointed us to the mission.  He always made it clear he cared more about our intimacy with Christ.  Yet, in the middle of his message on first love, the message of the mission came through loud and clear. He did this by connecting the two, our love for God, and our calling to go and make disciples.  After time spent with him, I always felt more drawn to God, and more fired up to go anywhere and talk with anyone about the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

Bill had his feet firmly planted in two camps, intimacy with God, and intentional evangelism.  Often, we feel a tension between the two, because we want to pursue God with all our heart but feel at times the demands of the mission get in the way.  For him though, his love for God, and the joy it brought to him, was the energy-infusion needed to pursue the mission with unbridled and uncluttered clarity. Honestly, I don’t see many like him anymore.  In him I saw a raw joy, and it’s what helped me fall more in love with God. His joy came out of abiding in Jesus and splashed onto everyone he met. 

My first touch with seeing this kind of joy, turned me toward an understanding that Jesus was more than the first part of an angry cuss. I was nineteen, restless and empty.  I decided to hitchhike around the country, taking any ride anywhere, to ask the driver a single question.   What is true?  On the seventh day out, after getting searched for pot, and thrown off the highway by a state trooper, I caught a ride by a college student named Russ.  He was headed home after what he said was a morning Bible Study.  I didn’t wait long to ask him.  “Russ, do you think there’s truth out there, and if so, can we find it?”  He literally laughed and threw his arm out the window in a wild gesture, making the car swerve and me nervous.  “Can you find it?” he repeated. “No, no,” he said.  “It finds you!”  “What do you mean,” I asked?  For the next thirty minutes, it was as though I was translated out of this world.  Russ was more than enthusiastic; he had a full throttled contagion of joy I had never encountered. To this day, I can’t remember a word he said, but after he dropped me off, I stood on the side of the road, in a kind of stupor, trying to absorb what had happened.  I wasn’t quite ready to buy what he said, but I decided in that moment to go after what he had! 

That’s what joy does.  That’s what people follow.  That’s what I want to mark my life, for the rest of my life. Out of a deep intimacy of devoted love, to be ready to spread the contagion of joy.  What about you?