A brief summary of my main desire in writing. I hope that others will find it helpful or useful. If this is the only article you read, I pray it changes your life, and your outlook on life within His church. Jesus could open the scroll of Isaiah to a specific sentence and point directly to it proclaiming, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke 4:21 – Can you? I’ve come to believe that if you can in fact do this at least at this stage in your journey then you will be faithful until the end of your physical journey. Knowing why you’re here is key to making it through difficult times in your odyssey.
How many times have you said to yourself, and even sometimes out loud “I wish I had a manual for how I’m supposed to live my life” or “I wish life came with instructions”? When you say that and people reply saying something like “well that’s what the bible is for”, that always kind of annoyed me. However, in 1999 or 2000 during a communion lesson the person sharing his lesson on the cross and what it meant referenced this passage in Luke 4:21 “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” It really struck me that as a young man Jesus could so easily understand himself and his purpose. That’s how this journey began, and for me personally that small prompting from a short communion lesson changed my life forever. For starters just understanding how incredible it actually was that Jesus could unroll the scroll of Isaiah and point to a specific piece of text was on its own merit impressive, let alone his relationship to the meaning of the text.
It occurred to me as I read the scene of that moment in Jesus’ life that perhaps everyone should be able to find themselves with this kind of confidence and approach their life with this kind of certainty. What if, in reality, God has left us enough clues in our lives as seen through faith reading scripture about who he meant for us to be. What if, with enough work trying to understand, we could actually open the bible and point to a specific piece of text that describes ourselves? When this idea occurred to me, I decided that I was going to start at Genesis 1:1 and read from cover to cover and back again until this happened for me. It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought to find the person who embodies my personality, skills, talents and desires. As I was reading through the story of Exodus, the person of Bezalel seemed to describe not just who I want to be, but who I’ve actually been for most of my life.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts.
Exodus 31:1-5
If you were to meet me for the first time, depending on the circumstances of our meeting your impression of who I am would stick in your mind and I would be limited to a certain skill for which you would associate with that meeting. This lesson occurred to me with great emphasis when I flew to Washington D.C. a few years ago for an international worship conference for my family of churches. I was invited as part of the technical crew to participate in organizing and mixing the audio for that event because of all the years of experience I had with playing this role in Chicago. So many of the singers who went to this conference from Chicago, as well as most of the technical crew, all saw me as an expert in live sound engineering and having the skill to mix well for large complex live performance venues. However, during one of the down times between planned events my wife and I went to the restaurant area in the hotel where I ran into a mixture of people who had at one time, or another interacted with or gotten to know who I am. I was baptized as a disciple in Ron and Rene Quint’s basement on August 16th, 1991. At the time I was only 23 years old, was working as a professional photographer, was managing a one-hour photo processing lab in a mall and was going through a divorce from my first wife. I dressed and looked like an artist. I was writing poetry and was working on a composition on the piano about the emotional turmoil I had gone through over the previous four or five years. A few years after that I was in Ron and Lavonia Drabot’s house church and at that time I was doing much more drawing and painting and had begun working as a designer and illustrator. A few years later and I was working as an I.T. Director and computer programmer and had worked on several film projects and computer animation projects, and I was also doing much of the design work for church events and conferences. Depending on when and how you met me I could have been a pianist, poet, photographer, illustrator, designer, I.T. professional, manager, director, any of a vast array of different skill sets. At this worship conference in Washington D.C. while riding one of the elevators on the way to diner I ran into three different people who had known me at different points in the past and had not seen me in many years. To one couple I was a pianist, to another an illustrator and designer, and to most at this particular conference I was a sound engineer, or just one of the nerdy guys that knows how to turn all the mics on.
My purpose in telling you all this information about my own personal experience is for two reasons both of which apply to the lessons I hope everyone hears in this study.
Number one, most of us don’t fit neatly into that one little box that people, even those who know us well, keep us limited to in their own minds. We grow and mature and re-invent ourselves many times in the short lives that we live here on planet earth. It takes grace and patience and work to change ourselves and then in turn to change the perceptions of those who know us. That’s why at 53 years of age my mother still worries about me enough to break into tears if I share some challenging personal situation with her. Or my stepfather continued to check whether or not I put oil in my car 34 years after I blew the engine in that one car when I was 19 years old, actually in that case I put regular gas in my mom’s diesel car engine. Just as a fun side note here if that hadn’t happened mom mother would not have met my stepfather and then been married to him for 34 years… just sayin’. For many people, even those who love you deeply and care about you with true genuine love, you will forever be frozen in time at some particular point in your journey, sometimes that’s a point on your journey that you would rather forget, and sometimes that’s a person who is severely limited and shallow. I am forever grateful that God knows me from the beginning to the end and sees the final result, not some broken version of me throughout my insanely complicated journey.
Number two, you are so much more than you know about yourself, if only you will have the courage to learn how to say yes when you are asked to fill a role. As God said to Moses in Exodus 4:11,12 The LORD said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the LORD? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” I have personally always taken this lesson to heart when someone asks me to do something. Especially if it is a role or responsibility serving a spiritual ministry or need. If God is asking you to do something in your life… just say yes. God will give you what you need if you have the courage to say yes. Don’t get me wrong, if you know that there is someone else who is willing and is better suited to fill that role then suggest that person or say yes to being responsible and then delegate those things that are better suited to someone else. If not then simply say yes, and God will provide what you need to fill that role with excellence. As long as you can say that you have done everything within your ability to fulfill that obligation to the best of your ability then your own conscience is clear, and you have honored God with your heart. Saying no in these instances even if you have legitimate arguments for why you should say no are often causing you to miss an opportunity for growth and could in many cases be causing you to experience God’s anger like Moses did. Read that story in Exodus 3 and 4 it’s the burning bush story and you will see that eventually God became angry with Moses and gave him Aaron to be his mouthpiece. In the end Aaron is the one in charge while Moses went up on Mt. Horeb, under Aaron’s leadership the community convinced him that it was a good idea to build a big golden idol in the form of a calf. Read the story for yourself, in Exodus 32, Aaron doesn’t even try to convince the people that they were proposing a ridiculous form of worship, he doesn’t even try to set them right in their thinking. He seems to agree with them right away and then come up with a plan to give them exactly what they want. The point is that God is asking you to do things often simply because you have the heart that is needed, not necessarily because you’ve exhibited the skill or can list it on your resume. When the need was there the people should have been looking to Moses and his heart for leadership, yet because of Moses’ insecurity early on in the story someone who did not have the heart that God was asking for stood there in his place and did not provide the leadership that the people needed in that moment.
God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not —to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.
1 Corinthians 1:27-29
As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.
Romans 4:17
So back to my personal story. All those different things that people know about me, musician, poet, writer, teacher, preacher, technical wizard, photographer, designer, illustrator etc… all of them are true and all of them I love to do and can do well if I am given the time and the resources to do them. God has filled me with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of crafts. Just to clarify I haven’t yet worked with gold, silver and bronze or cut and set stones… but I have made my own furniture and I love to work with wood. I just have not had the opportunity yet to do jewelry or sculpture with precious metals. But if you asked me to, I would definitely love the opportunity and I would say “YES!”
So here in Bezalel I found myself in the scriptures and I can point directly to this passage in the bible like Jesus did and say, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” The problem now becomes what am I supposed to do with this knowledge? Now it is left to me and my faith to piece together this truth or discovery and figure out why God put me here and at this time, in this place. What is it that God is expecting me to do with this knowledge? Acts 17:24 says that God determined the exact place and time that I would be here and I believe that is true of every time period and every step in my journey. Even the most brutal and shameful periods of my life were allowed for some reason. I honestly believe that to be true. Now I just need to figure out today and right now, where and when I am living as I write this sentence… “Is this what I am supposed to be doing?”
From this point on which for me was about the year 2002, I have read and studied and tried to piece together a reason for my own personal discovery of my place in God’s epic story. We aren’t living in the desert searching for a home with a pillar of fire leading us during the night from place to place. I didn’t witness God parting the sea so that my family and I could walk through on dry ground while he covered my enemies with that same water. Or maybe I did… maybe all those stories and details and illustrations within the story are meant to guide me into a deeper more spiritual version of the same exact story.
The rest of this book is my discovery of the epic story of my place in the universe and my own personal discovery of some simple truths about how I have found faith in the path God lays out in this particular story. I am going to share some hard lessons I’ve come to understand about myself and about the reason for all the minute little details in the Exodus story and how it illustrates my own story, as well as how I believe you can find this same version of yourself somewhere in the biblical narrative. It is my hope that by reading these pages you will see yourself in my journey and be inspired to find that passage of scripture that says to you “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” I just hope that for you it isn’t Ezekiel 4.