God forms us into who we are through our gifts and by the triumphs and tragedies that make up our stories. Unearthing these things reveals His good design.
If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to that passage. I just want to pull out three phrases, show you those three phrases, and we’ll see what the Lord has for us. All right? Several years ago, I had a group of pastors that I was with while trying to finish my master’s degree. Why wouldn’t I do that when I’m 50 and have nothing left to prove? Apparently, I’m some sort of glutton for punishment. I was in this room with this group of guys, and the class was focused on everyone’s favorite topic: organizational theory. I know some of you really nerd out about that and would be like, «I would love that,» whereas others of you might think, «That sounds like a slow, torturous death.» On that scale, I’m closer to the latter. They brought in a guy named Doug Slabal, who was a startup specialist and operational strategist. In the middle of that, he was talking about life plans for both men and women. The idea of a life plan or life planning isn’t necessarily what you think; it’s not about retirement or anything like that. It’s more about getting a sense of who exactly you are. The question would be, «What is Matt Chandler going to do no matter where you put him?» What is it that you are going to do no matter where you are? Because that’s how God designed you, how God made you, and then placed you in a moment of time for His glory and your joy. So, what is that? How does that work? After a couple of years of wanting to do it but with our schedules not lining up, Lauren and I got to fly to Colorado this summer. The plan was to use these logistical tools to look at your life from a thousand different angles, and then near the end of the week, we would kind of see, «Hey, this is what God’s been doing in you; this is how He built you and created you.» There were moments in your life where it could have gone one way, but by the grace of God, it went another way. Here’s what happened. So, we finished that process, and I can tell you that I know you can dump me anywhere in the world, and I’m going to do something very specific. You can drop Lauren anywhere in the world, and she’s going to do something very specific. That’s the culmination of a lot of what we’ve been talking about these last three weeks. It reflects our general identity. We have both said «yes» to Jesus in the most radical way we know how, which means we’ve said «yes,» and you can take us where you want us to go. The commitment is already made; we are your people. You can send us where you want us to go, and we’ve answered your call. We’ve tried to live our lives that way. Additionally, it reflects how our specific identities have played out. I have been uniquely wired; I am different from Lauren, and Lauren is different from me. You are different from me; I am different from you. Part of who I am is caught up in this. One of my favorite exercises in the life plan was one called turning points. Turning points aren’t necessarily cool moments in your life, like «And then Reed was born.» It’s more about what moments in your life caused a shift in the way you saw the world. Are you tracking with me on that? It’s not just like, «And then I met Lauren.» It’s more like, «This happened; this relationship happened; this event happened,» and in that happening, it shifted how I perceived the world around me. In fact, I shared one of those turning points with you last week. When I was five years old, my family went to counseling; it didn’t have anything to do with me, yet I interpreted that whole scene as, «I am a problem; I cause trouble; I’m a lot to handle.» That may or may not be true, but in that incident, which didn’t have anything to do with me, I started to shape how I saw the world and how I wanted to live my life. I didn’t want to be a problem; I wanted to handle it myself. I didn’t want to need anybody, and I lived my life out of that mindset. That is a turning point for me. I did mine up until the age when I met Lauren, and she did hers up until we met one another. We then did our turning points together up until this very season of life. They document it all on paper and hang it on the wall. When you finish days full of really intense, sometimes tearful, and rage-inducing memory work, it is not meant to make you a narcissist but rather to make you marvel at who God is and what He is doing in your life. We saw on paper across this whole office wall two things: God’s unrelenting, unwavering faithfulness to me long before I ever cared about Him at all.
