Bio
RAVI ZACHARIAS
Ravi Zacharias is Founder and President of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2014. Dr. Zacharias has spoken all over the world for 44 years in scores of universities, notably Harvard, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge. Mr. Zacharias has direct contact with key leaders, senators, congressmen, and governors who consult him on an ongoing basis.
Born in India in 1946, Ravi immigrated to Canada with his family twenty years later. While pursuing a career in business management, his interest in theology grew; subsequently, he pursued this study during his undergraduate education. He received his Master of Divinity from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. Well-versed in the disciplines of comparative religions, cults, and philosophy, he held the chair of Evangelism and Contemporary Thought at Alliance Theological Seminary for three and a half years.
Mr. Zacharias has authored or edited well over twenty books including the Gold Medallion winner Can Man Live Without God (Word, 1994), Walking from East to West (Zondervan, 2006), The Grand Weaver (Zondervan, 2007), Has Christianity Failed You? (Zondervan, 2010), Why Jesus, (FaithWords, 2012), and Beyond Opinion (Thomas Nelson, 2007), which includes contributions from RZIM’s global team. His latest books are Jesus Among Secular Gods (January 2017) and Why Suffering? (2014), both coauthored with Vince Vitale and released by FaithWords. Several of his books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Spanish, and other languages.
Ravi has appeared on CNN, Fox, and other international broadcasts. His weekly radio program, “Let My People Think,” airs on 2337 outlets worldwide, his weekday program, “Just Thinking,” on 721, and his one-minute “Just a Thought,” on 488. Various broadcasts are also translated into Romanian and Turkish, and “Let My People Think” airs as the Spanish-language program “Pensemos” on over 250 outlets in sixteen countries. Additionally, his television program, “Let My People Think,” is broadcast internationally in several countries including Indonesia.
RZIM is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with additional offices in Canada, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Hong Kong, Romania, Turkey, Austria, Spain, and South Africa. Dr. Zacharias and his wife, Margie, have three grown children. They reside in Atlanta.
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While Chicke has not interviewed Ravi Zacharias (yet), his book the Grand Weaver plays a subtle, yet powerful role at the end of The Game Changer.
That book, published in 2007 by Zondervan, begins with a simple story of a man who seeks out the company that wove the beautiful saris worn by brides in India. What he finds in a small town in Northern India shows him the model of how the Grand Weaver guides us and makes sense of all of the different threads of our lives, making something beautiful not only out of the brilliant blues and reds in our experiences, but that the browns and the blacks of our lives also accentuate the resulting work of art. Zacharias is masterful in how he delivers God’s message in such practical, relatable terms, visualizing the Father as the master weaver and the son, sitting at his feet, learning from and responding to His guidance.
In 1974 Chicke heard Corrie ten Boom, the author of The Hiding Place, speak in Milwaukee about her time in Ravensbruck prison camp near Berlin. Ms. ten Boom used a similar metaphor, although hers was about God as a weaver of the tapestry of our lives.
In the ensuing years, Chicke had often talked about the knots in her own life and the beauty of the resulting scene on the front of a tapestry once you could see it from God’s perspective. So when she read about the loom and the colored threads and the saris in the Zacharias’ work, the story immediately resonated with her and she loved the picture of God as the Grand Weaver.
In The Game Changer, Avi, the CEO of the Company, initially sees the capital raise as one of the dark elements in his life. Using ten Boom’s metaphor, it would be one of the knots on the back of his own metaphorical tapestry. It is only when he sees that investment as one of the highlights, that he can turn around the tapestry and see not the jumble of knots and random threads, but instead could see the beautiful picture of what could and would emerge.
Avi’s struggle is symbolic of Fitzgerald’s own struggle with the concept of raising capital, but her deep faith in Zacharias’ Grand Weaver gives her confidence that her own story will end up like the wedding sari, as a work of art.
The Story
PLACEHOLDER FOR VIDEO OF CHICKE TALKING ABOUT THE GRAND WEAVER AND HOW IT PLAYED INTO THE GAME CHANGER STORY
