Rich men in 1780s England opened their snuffboxes after dinner and found a man in chains looking back at them, and somebody had put him there on purpose.

For the next few weeks, I'm taking one dangerously creative Christian a week and the trait that made them dangerous. The first trait was on sidestepping the gatekeeper.

Today is about snuffboxes (i.e., a small, portable container designed to hold scented, powdered tobacco called, you won't believe it, snuff).

Trait 2: A dangerously creative Christian puts the message on something people already want to carry or wear.

I call it the snuffbox test: would anyone carry your idea around if they didn't have to?

We usually make our case once, loud, and hope it sticks, and it works like a firework: loud and pretty, and by morning someone's sweeping it off the lawn.

A snuffbox is the thing your grandpa kept on the dresser for forty years.

In 1785, a 25-year-old Cambridge student enters a Latin essay contest. The prompt asks if it is lawful to make people slaves against their will.

Clarkson badly wants to win, so he does what any overachiever does and reads everything, including firsthand accounts of the slave trade. It wrecks him, as it should.

He wins anyway. Riding to London, he gets off his horse at Wadesmill and just sits by the road. If the essay was true, he later wrote, "it was time some person should see these calamities to their end."

Only then does he realize he is the person.

He goes all in, the way overachievers do. He rides roughly 35,000 miles gathering evidence, carrying a box of shackles, handcuffs and thumbscrews, and he opens it in rooms full of people who'd never had to face the reality of slavery.

It worked one room at a time, which is a problem, because England had a lot of rooms.

Enter a potter named Josiah Wedgwood. He makes a medallion with a kneeling man in chains and one question: "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"

People went nuts for it. Clarkson wrote that some had it "inlaid in gold on the lid of their snuff-boxes." Women wore it in bracelets and "as pins for their hair." (Wedgwood even mailed a batch to Ben Franklin, who is officially the Forrest Gump of this series.)

Clarkson's question was showing up at dinner parties he'd never be invited to. The most persuasive thing in the whole movement fit in a rich man's pocket.

That shouldn't surprise us, because God has always done this. He spoke from a burning bush and showed up in a feeding trough, places nobody would have picked.

Paul got it too. In Athens he found an altar "to an unknown god" already standing in the city and quoted their own poets back to them.

When we decide the truth only belongs behind a pulpit or on a church sign, we're being more careful than God ever was.

Some dangerously creative Christians are already passing the snuffbox test.

The Super Bowl is the biggest ad break in America. He Gets Us has bought time in it every year since 2023. This February its 60-second spot asked a stadium full of beer and car commercials if there's more to life than more.

Prom is already on every high school calendar. Every February, the Tim Tebow Foundation's Night to Shine throws one for people with special needs. This year 979 churches in 76 countries crowned more than 120,000 guests as kings and queens.

Energy drinks already sit in every gas station fridge. In September, Sadie Robertson Huff launched a half-caff line with 4GVN, a brand that puts Scripture on every can.

Here's a dangerously creative idea.

Run the snuffbox test on your own week.

Then go.

Rich men were already carrying snuffboxes. Wedgwood gave them something worth putting on the lid.

Pick one thing left on your list and put something on it this week. Then hit reply and tell me what you picked.

Until next time,

Payton ✌️

P.S. I have a friend worth reading

Clarkson put the question somewhere people would see it every day. My friend Andy Heddle does that with Scripture.

Bible Copy Club is a free daily Scripture writing plan by email. You get a short passage, you copy it out by hand, and it sticks in a way scrolling never does. Andy has also sent a lot of you my way, so consider this me returning the favor. Go try a week.