When I arrived at FSU back in 2007, one of the names that I heard pretty regularly was “Myron Rolle”. Myron was playing safety for the Seminoles football team those years. While Myron was here, he qualified for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford where he earned a masters of science in medical anthropology. After this, he went on to play in the NFL for 3 years before leaving and chasing down a dream of becoming a doctor. He is currently a “Global Neurosurgery Fellow” at Harvard Medical School.
Myron is back in town now promoting his new book, “The 2% Way”. It’s not a treatise on the advantages of the median milk that stands between “Whole” and “Skim” – but rather, it is about Myron’s personal philosophy of chasing down big dreams by making small incremental improvements (2% improvements) regularly over time.
The fact that it is being published by Zondervan Publishing makes me think that it will also feature some of Myron’s Christian faith. This makes me wonder about how 2% increments work in terms of our Christian lives. On the one hand, they don’t at all. Theology is notably allergic to percentages, making such audacious claims as “Jesus is 100% God and 100% man” and that we are “100% saint” and “100% sinner”. But I have also been skeptical of a theological system that refused any advances whatsoever. It’s more like our advances are horizontal in direction while God’s work is vertical. It doesn’t negate advancement, but our advances just don’t go in the direction we would need for salvation.
Our 2% advances are growth for ourselves and growth for our neighbor. They are us working on ourselves for the sake of others, and they are working for others. Normally speaking, they are not huge advances in and of themselves, but little regular advances over time. But without these advances, without actually trying to move the needle on our own part a little bit, we lose a little of the miracle of salvation.
The miracle of salvation is that God doesn’t work on us 2% at a time. He worked 100% on us and continues to keep us at 100%. When we embrace the 2%, we begin to see how big the 100% salvation is that He sustains in us.