We settled on Colorado Springs. My parents were moving there, and it seemed like a reasonable place. I had enough money to build a house and buy a small struggling manufacturing business for a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Life was looking better. Happiness was once again looming, though at the ripe old age of twenty-eight I was growing hardened to this mad, passionate pursuit of pleasure that had propelled me through my first nearly three decades.

I took over the business, rounded up the twenty or so employees, and cast a new vision for the future. I really had no assurance that the ambitious plans I proposed to them would work, but I delivered the plans with utmost conviction, enough to persuade even me.

To my delight, the team responded immediately. We slashed programs and developed new ones. We struck out on a new path that we all believed would take us up the mountain to the heights of success.

It was there, in the bowels of that company, a new realization raged to the surface of my mind: vision propels. We all are motivated primarily by the hope of what lies ahead of us. The company had been paralyzed by the lack of vision, but by building a new hope for a brighter future, I had caused a stir of great energy among the employees that propelled the company forward. Without a vision the people would have perished, but with a vision, they would conquer the world.

My vision wasn’t particularly insightful. I am sure that any one of a dozen directions would have suited the business just fine. But the passion I managed to inject into that vision began paying huge dividends.

We humans are built for hope. Without it, we slumber and die. With it, we live and thrive. We managed to double profits within twelve months, at which time I sold the company for nearly four times what I had paid for it.

Thrilled by my success, I repeated the process. I found other struggling businesses that I could believe in, injected them with passionate vision, and raised them from the dead before selling them at significant profits. The power of vision and hope was astounding. People seemed desperate to follow any passionately cast hope.

Ted Dekker The Slumber of Christianity. Nashville: Nelson Books, 2005, p. 49-50.