How to Set God-Sized Goals and Trust Him to Work Through You
Hannah More had little reason to believe she could change the world. Her family was dirt-poor. Her town was small. Her health was fragile. And she was born in the 1700s, when little
was expected of women in a male-dominated world.
Summarizing the “prevailing attitudes of the time,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously wrote that “the whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them . . . these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught them from childhood.”
But Hannah More didn’t get the memo. Instead, the precocious teenager accomplished her absurdly audacious goals of befriending Britain’s biggest celebrities, producing hit plays, and publishing novels that outsold her contemporary Jane Austen’s ten to one.
As impressive as those accomplishments were, they pale in
comparison to the goal More wrote in her journal in her early forties: “to abolish the slave-trade in Africa.”
What’s more impressive than the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me size of that goal is that she actually accomplished it alongside her col-laborator William Wilberforce. So integral was More’s contribution to the cause that for years Christian missionaries named nameless and orphaned African girls Hannah in her honor.
Hannah More had little reason to believe she could change the world. But she did have one reason: She believed the Maker of heaven and earth was with her and working through her. And that led her to “a greater sense of . . . calling” and what was possible for God to accomplish through her redemptive quests.
STOP LOOKING IN THE MIRROR AND START LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW
Part of what makes a goal “redemptive” as I defined it in chapter 1 is Who the goal is pursued with—namely, God. But the sad truth is that most Christians’ goals don’t reflect a belief that God is with them, and so they pale in comparison to Hannah More’s.
