Purpose 37
Many times King Saul pursued him with intent to kill, and every time
David escaped. Eventually, he succeeded Saul as king of Israel, even
winning over Saul’s son Jonathan as his strongest ally.
For a modern-day David with an equally ragtag group of ‘‘mighty
men’’ (and women) who were transformed by purpose, we can turn to
Jack Stack of Springfield Remanufacturing. When Stack was dispatched
to this antiquated manufacturing facility in a remote area of Missouri,
the staff was demoralized and purposeless. The facility had twenty days
to ship an order of 800 tractors to the Soviet Union, with a huge cash
penalty to the company if the order was not delivered. Up to that point
they had been turning out tractors at the rate of five per day!
Stack did what King David had done. He ‘‘shared the mess.’’ Like
David challenging his ‘‘mighty men’’ to help him take over the king-
dom, Stack held out a goal: 800 tractors in twenty days. He didn’t mini-
mize the difficulties; he acknowledged them and gave his people
freedom in deciding how to overcome them. He freed them from the
rigid job descriptions in effect at the plant and helped them to become
more of a team with a unifying purpose.
What happened was a miracle similar to that of the loaves and the
fishes or a poor shepherd boy’s ascendancy to the throne of Israel. With
limited resources and the same ‘‘ragtag’’ group that had been making
five tractors a day, Stack’s ‘‘mighty men and women’’ assembled and
shipped over forty tractors per day to meet their goal. Like David, Stack
had no choice but to rely on his people to join his sense of purpose:
‘‘People participate in something larger than themselves, something that
has a powerful meaning, both individually and collectively.’’ One of
Stack’s ‘‘mighty men’’ put it this way: ‘‘I’m not just a name on a time
card. I’m a person, and what I have to say means something. I matter.’’^12
Purpose is often manifested in physical acts. Hezekiah was a young
king who ascended the throne of Israel at age 25. His father, King Ahaz,
had strayed dramatically from the original purpose of his people. He
even ordered his own sons to be sacrificed to placate the idols Baal and
Molech.
Hezekiah, one of the sons spared this sacrifice, realized that strong
symbolic measures were necessary to put the people of Israel back ‘‘on