HE'S WILD, YOU KNOW.

C.S. Lewis portrays Jesus as the lion Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia. 'He's wild, you know," Mr. Beaver says of him near the end of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. "Not like a tame lion."

Jesus was fierce. Two stories from the Gospel of John, taken together, portray this ferocity. The first is  the Cleansing of the Temple when Jesus snapped on the money-changers and merchants who were doing business in the house of God. The other comes right before it at the Wedding at Cana, when Jesus turned water into wine. In this  sequence of events Jesus goes from life of the party to extreme wet blanket in the space of about a hundred words. Acceptance means nothing to Jesus. He's not out to please people; he's out to show us the boundaries: have blast, but don't hurt others. At Cana, he provides the best wine, and lots of it. It's a party. In the temple, he provides a wake-up call.

That captures ferocity for me. It's the ability to maintain perspective and focus under all circumstances, and act accordingly.

"'Course he isn't safe," Mr. Beaver says. "But he's good." This can be taken two ways. First, he isn't safe to the rest of us. Second, he isn't safe from the rest of us. For a person of destiny, it's a little of both. Building a dream presents a challenge to the people around you, because deep down everybody wants to do it. For many, it causes disturbance in that deep down place. In that way, the person of destiny is not safe to the rest of us. Everyone will have their reactions, and some will not be pleasant. You mustn't even too heavily on the pleasant reactions, or you may start to identify with them. In these ways the person of destiny is not safe from the rest of us. 

A wild animal is fierce because it lives with a constant, total lack of safety. But that doesn't stop it from walking the forest. It just makes it fierce. Temper that with vision, purpose, and compassion for the very things that threaten it, and you've got Jesus. Ferocity of vision is the ability to fight that pernicious tendency of mobs large or small to bow to less demanding standards, and for certain individuals within  those mobs to champion those low standards, fueled by the approval of the mob. If you wander into a mob like that you may be ignored, shouted down, or even killed, which is what happened to Jesus. The mob he wandered into is called humanity. His ferocity is found in the fact that he knew this, and did it anyway.

It takes ferocity to build a dream.

Ever forward.

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