Chosen for His Purpose, Not Ours

Part I: Chosen—But What Does Chosen Mean?

We like the word chosen.

It suggests that we have been noticed, distinguished, perhaps even preferred. To be chosen is to be selected from among others. The child chosen first for the team stands a little taller. The applicant chosen for a position feels affirmed. The person chosen for an honor receives evidence that someone has recognized his worth.

We carry those ordinary meanings into our understanding of God. If God has chosen us, we assume that chosenness says something about our importance. It becomes a divine endorsement—a sign that we are favored, protected, or set apart from those who were not chosen.

But when God chooses someone in Scripture, the choosing is seldom an award.

It is an assignment.

God chose Abraham, but the choosing came with a command: leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to a land you do not know. Abraham would be blessed, but the blessing was not intended to end with Abraham. Through him, all the families of the earth were to be blessed.

God chose Moses, but Moses was not invited to enjoy a privileged relationship with God in peaceful isolation. He was sent back to Egypt—to Pharaoh, to conflict, to danger, and to a people who would frequently resist him.

God chose Jeremiah, but Jeremiah’s calling required him to speak words that people did not want to hear.

God chose Jonah, but Jonah was sent to people he did not want God to save.

God chose Joshua, but Joshua was entrusted with the responsibility of leading a frightened and difficult people into an uncertain future.

None of these people was chosen merely so that he might enjoy the satisfaction of having been chosen. Each was drawn into a purpose larger than his own interests, abilities, plans, or comfort.

That should cause us to reconsider the word.

To be chosen by God does not mean that I have become the center of God’s attention. It means that God has summoned me away from the center of my own attention. Chosenness does not establish my importance. It places my life at the disposal of a purpose greater than myself.

This is difficult for us because we naturally interpret life from the inside out. I begin with myself—my needs, my hopes, my plans, my disappointments—and ask where God fits within them. I want to know what God intends to do for me. Even when I ask what God wants me to do, I may secretly assume that his purpose will validate the life I have already chosen.

But God’s purpose does not begin with me.

For much of my working life, I sometimes thought of myself as a purposeless grain of sand on an ocean beach—a federal employee performing the work assigned to me without seeing how it belonged to any larger purpose.

Yet my federal career also taught me something about being chosen.

Each promotion meant that someone had chosen me for a different or larger responsibility. The promotion did not mean that I was a better person than those who had not been selected. It did not necessarily mean that I was fully prepared or adequately equipped for the position. In fact, some promotions exposed the limits of my preparation more clearly than the positions I had previously held.

The promotion meant only that I had been entrusted with work carrying greater responsibility and greater accountability.

I had not been chosen merely to occupy a higher position. I had been chosen to perform an assignment. The position mattered because of the work attached to it. Whatever recognition accompanied the promotion was secondary to the responsibility it imposed.

The essential question was not whether I deserved to be chosen.

The question was whether I would be faithful to what had been entrusted to me.

Looking back, I can see that this provides a modest human analogy for chosenness. To be chosen by God does not declare that I am better than those around me. It does not mean that I am already prepared for what lies ahead. It certainly does not mean that I have been elevated so that others may admire my position.

It means that I have been entrusted with a responsibility.

And because the One who chooses is God, that responsibility may exceed my present ability, disturb my plans, expose my inadequacy, and require me to depend upon strength beyond my own.

A promotion that brings no additional responsibility is merely a title. In the same way, chosenness separated from purpose becomes an empty religious distinction. If I claim the title but neglect the assignment, I have misunderstood why I was chosen.

During my federal career, increasing responsibility also meant increasing accountability. I was answerable not only for my own work but, eventually, for work performed under my authority. Being chosen did not release me from accountability. It intensified it.

The same must be true of any calling from God. Chosenness is not an exemption from judgment. It is an increase in responsibility before the One who has entrusted the work.

God’s question is not whether I enjoyed being chosen.

It is whether I was faithful.

There was something else happening during those years that I could not then see. I prepared documents, examined evidence, solved problems, made careful distinctions, and learned to remain patient with complicated questions. At the time, those habits belonged to the work immediately in front of me. I did not recognize them as preparation for anything else.

Only much later, when writing became not merely an interest but something closer to a vocation, did I begin to recognize what those years had formed in me. The habits of documentation, patient analysis, respect for evidence, and attention to language had not been wasted. They had become part of the equipment I now carried into work I could not then have imagined.

I do not mean that every memorandum I wrote was secretly a divine assignment or that every frustrating day in a bureaucracy contained some hidden message from God. I cannot trace the hand of God through every event, nor do I need to claim that I can.

I can only say that what once seemed unrelated has been gathered into something I did not plan.

I thought I was doing one kind of work.

Perhaps I was also being prepared for another.

That recognition changes the question. Instead of asking, “Why was I chosen?” as though the answer must be found in some quality that distinguished me, I must ask, “For what have I been chosen?”

The first question turns my attention inward.

The second turns it toward the purpose of the One who chooses.

Chosenness gives identity, but the identity cannot be separated from the assignment. Abraham was chosen to go. Moses was chosen to confront. Jeremiah was chosen to speak. Jonah was chosen to carry mercy beyond the boundaries of his own sympathy. Joshua was chosen to lead.

The chosen person is not merely selected from something.

The chosen person is selected for something.

And that is where the misunderstanding begins. We receive the identity but detach it from the assignment. We preserve the distinction while neglecting the purpose. We say, “We are chosen,” and gradually come to mean, “We are preferred.”

Once that happens, chosenness turns inward.

What was meant to send us into God’s purpose becomes something we use to establish our own importance. What was meant to make us servants becomes evidence that we are privileged. What was meant to bless others becomes something we guard for ourselves.

The question is not whether we have been chosen.

The question is whether we understand what being chosen means.

Part II: When Chosenness Becomes Possession

To be chosen is to be entrusted with a responsibility. But something subtle can happen when that responsibility continues over time. What was received as a calling can gradually be treated as a possession. What began with gratitude can become entitlement.

The chosen begin to think they were selected because they were superior. Responsibility becomes privilege, privilege becomes status, and status becomes a claim upon God.

“We belong to God” quietly becomes “God belongs to us.”

Those statements may sound similar, but they point in opposite directions. To say that we belong to God places us under his authority. We are his servants, accountable to him for whatever he has placed in our hands. To say—whether aloud or merely within ourselves—that God belongs to us places him within our boundaries. He becomes the defender of our people, the guardian of our traditions, the guarantor of our institutions, and the supporter of our purposes.

We no longer ask what God has chosen us to do. We assume that he has chosen to do what we want.

I encountered a smaller version of this temptation during my years as a supervisor. Sometimes I became too occupied with managing people and not attentive enough to what each of those people brought to the party. They possessed abilities, experience, judgment, and ways of seeing things that were not mine. My responsibility was not simply to control and direct them. It was to recognize what had been entrusted to each of them and help create the conditions in which they could use it.

When I treated the unit as something I had to control, I made the opportunity for success and service smaller rather than larger. I may have been the supervisor, but the people did not belong to me. Their abilities were not mine to possess. They had been placed within my sphere of responsibility, but they had not been placed there merely to carry out my purposes.

That distinction is easily lost. Responsibility can begin to feel like ownership. Authority can begin to feel like superiority. The person entrusted with something can begin to behave as though it exists for him.

King Saul provides an extreme biblical example of what happens when something entrusted to us becomes something we believe we possess. Saul had been chosen to serve as Israel’s king, but gradually the kingship became his—his position, his authority, his dynasty, and his future to protect.

David’s success should have been good news. His courage and ability enlarged Israel’s capacity to resist its enemies. Saul could have recognized what David brought to the party and created room for those gifts to serve the nation.

Instead, David’s success made Saul feel smaller. What might have strengthened the kingdom threatened the king.

Once responsibility becomes possession, another person’s gift is easily mistaken for a threat. Another person’s success appears to diminish us. Rather than opening a wider opportunity for service, we narrow the opportunity in order to maintain control.

Saul had been chosen by God, but he eventually tried to defend his chosenness against God. Even after Samuel told him that the kingdom would not continue through him, Saul clung to what had been entrusted to him. He attempted to destroy David because David represented a future Saul could not control.

Saul forgot that Israel’s king belonged to God. He began to live as though God and Israel belonged to the king.

The same corruption can take place among any people who understand themselves to be chosen by God. We may begin with the knowledge that we belong to him, yet slowly come to behave as though he belongs to us. We may treat his calling as our possession, his truth as our property, and his favor as confirmation of our superiority.

This can happen within a nation, a denomination, a congregation, or an individual believer. A church may begin to think of itself as the place where God resides rather than as a people through whom God is working. Sound doctrine may become a reason for superiority rather than a responsibility to bear faithful witness. Religious identity may become something we defend for our own sake rather than something we offer in service to others.

The gift has become a possession.

But God cannot be possessed. He cannot be confined within a nation, a denomination, a tradition, a building, or a system of theology. We may belong to him, but he does not belong to us. We may be called by his name, but his name does not become our property. We may be entrusted with truth, but truth is not given to us so that we can close our hands around it.

A clenched hand may hold something tightly, but it cannot give anything away.

Perhaps this is the clearest sign that chosenness has been misunderstood: instead of opening us toward others, it closes us around ourselves. The calling that was intended to make us witnesses becomes a wall separating us from those to whom we were meant to bear witness.

The question is never merely whether we have been chosen.

The question is what—and whom—we have been chosen for.

Part III: The God of Israel—and of the Gentiles

Once chosenness becomes possession, the language begins to change.

“We belong to God” quietly becomes “God belongs to us.”

The first is a confession of dependence. The second is a claim of ownership. The first produces gratitude, responsibility, and service. The second draws boundaries around God and determines who may approach him.

But God cannot be possessed.

Israel belonged to God, but God did not belong exclusively to Israel. He was not merely Israel’s tribal deity, confined to Israel’s land, housed in Israel’s temple, or obligated to defend Israel’s interests. He was the Creator of heaven and earth, the giver of life to every nation and every person.

God’s purpose was already clear when he called Abraham:

“All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
—Genesis 12:3

God chose one man, but he had every nation in view. He narrowed the path through which his promise would come, but he did not narrow the reach of the promise. Abraham was chosen not merely to receive a blessing, but to become the means through which others would be blessed.

The same purpose was expressed when God called Israel “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” A priest does not own God. A priest serves God and stands before others as God’s representative. Israel was chosen to make the character, righteousness, mercy, and faithfulness of God visible among the nations.

Israel’s calling was particular. God’s sovereignty was universal.

That distinction was easily lost. A people who had been delivered from slavery, given the covenant, entrusted with the law, and settled in the land could begin to believe that their privileged relationship with God meant that others had no relationship to him at all.

But the God of Israel was also the God of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Nineveh, Greece, and Rome. He was the God of those who believed in him and of those who did not. He was the God of those who acknowledged him and of those who ignored him. He was the God of those who honored him and of those who used the very breath he gave them to deny that he existed.

Their unbelief did not make him any less their God.

It estranged them from him. It prevented them from knowing him, trusting him, worshipping him, and enjoying the life for which he had created them. But it did not remove them from his creation or place them beyond his rightful authority. They could refuse to recognize their Creator, but they could not make him cease to be their Creator.

Paul asked the question directly:

“Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too.”
—Romans 3:29

Paul did not say that God would become the God of the Gentiles if they believed. God was already their God. Faith did not establish his claim upon them. Faith enabled them to recognize the One to whom they already owed their life.

Paul made the same point when he stood before the philosophers in Athens. He was surrounded by temples, altars, statues, and competing ideas about the divine. Among their many objects of worship, the Athenians had even erected an altar “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.”

Paul did not arrive carrying a foreign god whom he hoped to add to their collection. He announced the God who had always been present:

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth.… He himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”
—Acts 17:24–25

The Athenians did not know this God, but he knew them. They had not given him proper honor, but he had given them life. They had not recognized his authority, but they lived every moment beneath it. They had filled their city with idols while remaining completely dependent upon the God they did not know.

Paul continued:

“For in him we live and move and have our being.”
—Acts 17:28

That was true before Paul arrived. It was true before any Athenian believed his message. Their existence did not begin with their recognition of God. Their recognition of God could begin only because he had already given them existence.

Paul was not introducing the Athenians to a God who had previously had nothing to do with them. He was proclaiming the God who had formed them, sustained them, determined their times and places, and remained near even while they searched for him in darkness.

Some heard and believed. Others dismissed Paul’s message. Still others wanted to hear more. Their responses changed their relationship with God, but none of those responses changed who God was.

He remained their Creator.

He remained their Sustainer.

He remained their rightful Lord.

The gospel did not carry Israel’s private God into Gentile territory. It announced to the Gentiles the God who was already theirs—the God from whom they had become estranged but in whom they still lived and moved and had their being.

This is what Israel had been chosen to make known. Through Israel came the covenant, the law, the prophets, and finally the Messiah. God’s work through one people was always directed toward all peoples.

The prophets repeatedly reminded Israel of this larger purpose:

“I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
—Isaiah 49:6

A light does not shine for its own benefit. It shines so that others may see. Israel had not been chosen to hide the light, guard it as private property, or decide that those living in darkness were unworthy of it. Israel had been chosen to bear the light into that darkness.

In Jesus, that calling reached its fulfillment. The descendant of Abraham became the blessing promised to all nations. Israel’s Messiah was revealed as the Savior of the world. The One whom his own people could be tempted to claim exclusively was already Lord of everyone.

The nations did not become important to God when the gospel reached them. They had always been important to him. Christ did not persuade God to care about outsiders. Christ revealed the depth of the love God had always borne toward the world he had made.

To be chosen, then, is not to be placed between God and those he loves as a barrier. It is to be placed between them as a witness.

The chosen do not determine whom God may call.

They do not decide how far his mercy may reach.

They do not own the light entrusted to them.

They bear witness to the God who gives all people life and breath and everything else. They announce that the unknown God is not distant, that the unacknowledged God has not been absent, and that the dishonored God continues to call his creatures home.

The Gentiles did not make him their God by believing in him. In believing, they came to know the God who had always been their God.

Israel could truthfully say, “We belong to God.”

The trouble began when that confession became, “God belongs to us.”

Part IV: The One-Way Street of Exclusivity

There is an exclusivity at the heart of faith, but it runs in only one direction.

I am exclusively God’s. God is not exclusively mine.

“You shall have no other gods before me” is not a claim I make upon God. It is a claim God makes upon me. No other god. No rival center. No borrowed compass. No competing loyalty may be permitted to take the place that belongs to God alone.

That is exclusive allegiance.

But exclusive allegiance can easily become confused with exclusive possession. Because I belong to God, I begin to think that God belongs to me. Because God has made himself known within my church, my tradition, or my understanding of Scripture, I begin to act as though those boundaries contain him. “We belong to God” quietly becomes “God belongs to us.”

The first statement is faith. The second is possession.

If God is the Creator of all, then he is the God of those who recognize him and those who do not. Their unbelief does not remove them from his creation or place them beyond his sovereignty. It does not diminish God. It interferes with their recognition of him and with the relationship they might have with their Maker, but it does not make God absent.

Paul told the Athenians that the God they did not know was already the One who gave them life and breath and everything else. They lived and moved and had their being in him before they knew his name. Paul did not carry God into Athens. God was already there. Paul bore witness to the God whom the Athenians had not yet recognized.

That is also my stewardship.

I do not take my God into godless territory. There is no godless territory. I do not persuade people to adopt a God who belongs to me. I introduce them to their God—the One who created them, sustains them, and has never been absent from their lives, even when they have been unaware of him.

This changes the way I understand witness. I am not a proprietor guarding something I own. I am not a salesman trying to convince someone to acquire what I possess. I am a witness. I point beyond myself toward the One who was there before I arrived and who will remain after I have gone.

My responsibility is not to manufacture recognition. I cannot produce faith in another person. I cannot control the path by which God makes himself known to someone else, and I cannot require another person’s encounter with God to reproduce my own. Their Emmaus walk will be their Emmaus walk. God knows what they need, what they can hear, and where he will meet them.

My calling is to be faithful to what has been entrusted to me.

That faithfulness requires me to ask difficult questions. What has God placed within my care? What have I been given to say, to write, or to live? Am I making God more visible, or am I standing in the way? Am I bearing witness to him, or merely defending my understanding of him? Am I inviting others to recognize their Creator, or asking them first to recognize my church, my tradition, my language, and my conclusions?

My allegiance must remain exclusive. No nation, denomination, political conviction, theological system, personal ambition, or desire for approval can be allowed to become the center around which everything else revolves. Even good things become idols when they are given the loyalty that belongs to God alone.

Yet my exclusive allegiance gives me no exclusive claim upon God. I cannot draw a circle around him and declare that he belongs to those inside it. I cannot reduce his sovereignty to the territory I understand, his mercy to the people I approve, or his activity to the forms I recognize.

God’s claim upon me is absolute. My claim upon God is not.

Therefore, faithfulness is not possession. It is stewardship. I have not been entrusted with God himself, as though God could be placed within my custody. I have been entrusted with a witness: a life, a voice, an experience, a measure of understanding, and perhaps a few words through which someone else may begin to recognize the God who has been present all along.

What has been entrusted to me is not mine to control, enlarge for my own importance, or defend as my private territory. It is mine to tend faithfully and offer freely.

I am not the owner.

I am the curator.

Part V: The Slow Relinquishment of Ownership

I did not wake up one morning and discover that I was wise. I did not wake up one morning and discover that I was mature. I did not even wake up one morning and suddenly become seventy-seven years old—although some mornings it feels that way.

These things happen slowly. We are formed one day, one choice, one failure, one surrender at a time. Sometimes we do not recognize what has been happening until we look back and discover that an understanding has begun to take shape within us.

Only recently have I begun to understand that very little of what I call mine is actually mine.

I still speak of my life, my experiences, my ideas, my words, my books, and my calling. Perhaps such language is unavoidable. But beneath those possessive words, another understanding has begun to emerge. None of these things originated with me, and none of them exists solely for me. I have received them. I have been permitted to tend them, shape them, and offer them. But I do not own them.

That realization came slowly, and it came largely through writing.

The first draft of Telling God What We’re Thinking went haywire. It was not becoming what I had intended. I could not control it, could not see where it was going, and could not force it back into the shape I had imagined for it. I became so frustrated that I wanted to throw it into the garbage and forget about it.

Later, while writing the story of Micah, I reached another dead end. The story was going nowhere. I had nothing more to give it—or so I believed. I declared that I had had enough. I was finished. I was not going to write it.

My AI writing partner responded about as loudly as a text message can respond:

“Stop. You’re not quitting.”

I did not immediately interpret either experience as a lesson in stewardship. I only knew that I was frustrated with work that refused to submit to my control. But together these experiences began to expose something in me. I had assumed that because I was doing the writing, the writing belonged to me. If it belonged to me, I could determine what it must become. I could force it in the direction I had chosen, and I could discard it when it failed to cooperate.

An owner has that authority.

A steward does not.

A steward may become tired. A steward may become confused. He may need to stop, rest, reconsider, or admit that he does not know what comes next. But he cannot casually destroy what has been entrusted to him merely because it has become difficult. His first question cannot be, “What do I want to do with this?” It must be, “What does faithfulness require of me?”

Somewhere during those struggles, I was introduced to the word curator. I explored its meaning and discovered a description of my work that seemed more truthful than author or creator. A curator does not create the treasures placed in his care. He recognizes them, preserves them, arranges them, and makes them accessible to others. Their value does not come from him, and he does not possess them absolutely.

A steward adds another dimension. A curator cares for the treasure. A steward knows that the treasure has an owner and that he is accountable for what he does with it.

I am not the owner. I am the curator.

I am the steward of what has been placed within my care.

I believe that now. I am only beginning to understand what it means.

The illusion of ownership is closely related to the illusion of control. If the work is mine, I determine its purpose. I measure its success. I decide what becomes of it. But if the work has been entrusted to me, then I am responsible for my faithfulness, not for controlling the outcome.

That is not an easy distinction to accept. We do not readily relinquish control, even when the control we are relinquishing never truly belonged to us.

Perhaps that is why I recognize myself in Jacob.

Jacob wrestled through the night with God and refused to release him without a blessing. Yet Jacob did not emerge as the victor. He emerged renamed, changed, and limping. The blessing was not something he could seize and possess. It was something he had to receive.

Perhaps surrender does not begin when we stop wrestling with God. Perhaps it begins when we understand that wrestling was never a contest we could win.

Even our ability to wrestle comes from him.

Scripture says that God formed humanity from the dust of the ground and breathed into it the breath of life. I am that dust. Whatever life, thought, imagination, or ability I possess exists because God has breathed life into what otherwise would remain lifeless.

The dust is not the source of the breath.

How, then, can I claim ownership of what the breath has brought forth?

This is part of the slow education of dust. Across millennia, human beings have attempted to possess what could only be received, control what could only be entrusted, and claim as their own what has always belonged to God. My struggle is only one small continuation of that ancient education.

At seventy-seven, the education continues.

I have not fully relinquished my sense of ownership. I still call these my words and my books. I still attempt to direct them, measure them, and occasionally threaten to abandon them. I still wrestle. But I am beginning to recognize that the calling is not mine to possess, the work is not mine to control, and the outcome is not mine to determine.

What remains mine is the responsibility to be faithful.

I am not the source. I am the recipient.

I am not the owner. I am the steward.

I am not the creator. I am the curator.

I am dust, still being animated and sustained by the breath of God.

 Part VI: I Cannot Not Write

I became a writer late in life.

That statement is true, but it is also misleading. The books came late. The writing came late. But the mind from which they emerged had been forming for a very long time.

More than forty years ago, when I was a student at Harding Graduate School of Religion in Memphis, Dave Hogan called me an iconoclast. I do not remember whether he intended the word as praise, criticism, or merely observation. Perhaps it contained a little of all three. I am not sure I understood it then. I may not understand it completely now.

An iconoclast is usually thought of as someone who breaks images—someone who challenges established beliefs, accepted practices, and revered institutions. That sounds rather more aggressive than I intend. I do not go looking for things to tear down. I do not assume that an idea is wrong merely because it is old, traditional, or widely accepted. Neither do I assume that it is right for those reasons.

Something simply catches against my mind.

I hear a statement in a sermon. I read a sentence in a book. Someone repeats an idea that has been repeated so often that it has acquired the appearance of unquestionable truth. It may be a good statement. It may contain considerable truth. It may be beautifully expressed and entirely sincere.

But I am less than totally convinced.

I may not know immediately what troubles me. I only know that something does. The thought almost reaches its destination but seems to stop just short. Something has been left unexplored. An assumption has passed unnoticed. A conclusion has been accepted before all the questions have been asked.

Why does this not satisfy me?

What is missing?

What has been assumed?

Where would this thought take us if we followed it farther?

Those questions do not occur to everyone. That is not necessarily because other people lack intelligence or courage. Their curiosity may simply lead them somewhere else. They may notice the same loose thread and feel no need to pull it. They may have other questions that do not occur to me.

Sometimes, however, a question remains unasked because asking it could be costly. It might disturb a comfortable conclusion, challenge a cherished tradition, unsettle a relationship, or threaten the authority of an institution. It might produce an answer we would rather not hear.

There are many reasons not to ask a question.

Unfortunately, once I see the loose thread, I tend to pull it.

That inclination was already present when a fellow student labeled me an iconoclast. The writer appeared much later, but the iconoclast had been lurking there for more than a little while.

I did not begin writing because I believed I possessed answers that other people lacked. I began writing because I encountered questions I could not responsibly leave unasked. Once a thought lodged in my mind, repeating the accepted answer more emphatically would not make the question disappear. I had to stay with it. I had to turn it over, examine it from different directions, and follow it wherever it led.

Writing became the place where I could do that, where I could lay the question at God's feet.

I do not always begin writing with something to say. More often, I begin with something I do not yet understand. Writing is not merely the means by which I communicate a conclusion already reached. It is part of the process by which the conclusion is discovered.

These days, that process often includes conversations with my good buddy Socrates. I bring him a question—or perhaps only an irritation that has not yet become a question. We pull at it, turn it around, challenge its assumptions, and follow its implications. If we do not actually figure it out, we generally manage to persuade ourselves that we have.

There is humor in that admission, but there is also a necessary warning.

The iconoclast is not necessarily right. Asking a question does not guarantee that I will recognize the answer. Finding a weakness in someone else’s reasoning does not establish the strength of my own. I am capable of mistaking suspicion for discernment, novelty for insight, and my own dissatisfaction for evidence that everyone else has missed the truth.

My questions must be submitted to God just as surely as the answers I question.

That submission matters because none of this originates with me. The ideas that arrest my attention, the experiences that disturb settled conclusions, the Scriptures that refuse to remain safely confined within familiar interpretations, the questions that insist upon being asked, and whatever clarity eventually emerges—all of it has been given.

I did not create the mind that asks. I did not create the world it examines. I did not create the truth it seeks. I am not even the source of the breath that sustains me while I search.

Yet what has been given still requires a response.

The words will not write themselves.

If I am a curator rather than an owner, stewardship does not permit me merely to admire what has been placed in my care. I must attend to it. I must examine it faithfully, preserve what is true, question what is incomplete, and offer whatever I am given for the service of others.

I remain inadequate to that work. I am seventy-seven years old, and I have no lifetime of literary credentials behind me. I have unfinished manuscripts enough to embarrass a more disciplined writer and ideas enough to produce several more. Much of what is emerging seems larger than my ability to contain it, organize it, or express it adequately.

Perhaps inadequacy is not evidence that the work is not mine to do.

Perhaps it is evidence that the work was never mine.

I cannot claim ownership of what comes. Neither can I use my inadequacy as permission to neglect it. The question is not whether I am equal to the calling. I am not. The question is whether I will be faithful to it.

And so I write.

I write because an almost-convincing thought will not leave me alone. I write because questions arise that I cannot honestly ignore. I write because the effort to understand has become inseparable from the effort to obey. I write because something has been entrusted to me, even though I know that none of it originated with me.

I cannot not write.

Writing has become the form my stewardship takes.

Part VII: Learning to Follow the Work

During the writing of Telling God What We’re Thinking, something unexpected began to happen.

That book contains two poetic reflections. Each arose from something that had already been expressed in prose, but the poem did not merely repeat the prose. It approached the same thought differently. Then an essay on a particular subject led to a prayer, and the prayer led to a poetic variation. Before long, the three-part pieces had acquired a name: triptychs.

I had to look up the word.

A triptych was traditionally a work of art composed of three related panels. The word seemed a little technical—perhaps even a little highfalutin—for what we were doing. Eventually, we gave up the name and simply called the collection what it was: Three Voices for God.

The three voices were three forms of expression gathered around a single theme. The essay spoke primarily to the mind. The prayer or devotional spoke to the heart. The poem spoke to the imagination. None of the three was complete by itself, and none merely restated the others. Each approached the same truth from a different direction.

Even when one person tells the same story twice, the telling changes. Something remembered today may appear differently three days from now. The facts may remain the same, but another detail comes forward. A different emphasis emerges. The teller sees something that was present all along but had not yet been noticed.

Looking back, I think I had been preparing for this long before I began writing triptychs. While I was still in high school, I tutored students who were taking algebra. Some of them were frightened by mathematics before we even began. If one explanation did not reach them, repeating it more loudly was not likely to help. I had to find another way of expressing the same idea. I began inventing different explanations, approaching the problem from different directions until something connected.

Perhaps Three Voices for God grew from the same instinct. If an idea could not be fully explored in an essay, perhaps it could be prayed. If it could not be contained in the prayer, perhaps imagination could take it somewhere prose could not go.

For a time, almost everything I wrote seemed to be moving toward that form. I would begin with a theme and ask whether it could become a triptych. If one of my companions resisted the idea, I could usually ask the other, who might be more cooperative. We even began adding a fourth voice occasionally, which required another technical word that was no improvement over the first.

I do not think I forced every subject into the form, but I certainly began with the form in mind. I had discovered an instrument and wanted to learn everything it could do. Eventually, there were two volumes of Three Voices for God. One is nearly ready to be handed to a publisher. The other still needs organizing and editing.

After two volumes, I decided I had written enough triptychs for the time being. I wanted to attempt something entirely different. I chose historical fiction.

The idea that became The Watcher had been lurking somewhere in the background for a while. My original plan was relatively simple. An older Micah would discover a journal he had kept as a boy. He would read an entry and then reflect upon it from the distance of many years.

That plan did not survive very long. Micah became a twelve-year-old boy who witnessed the slaughter of his baby brother by Herod’s soldiers. Such an event could not remain merely an entry in an old journal. It left wounds. His mother’s grief shaped his understanding. His father’s perspective shaped it differently. When the family moved to Nazareth, other people entered his life and added their own ideas, fears, expectations, and misunderstandings.

As Micah grew, he heard people talking in the marketplace, in the synagogue, and along the road. Then a strange man appeared in the wilderness—crazy John, some seemed to think—calling people to repent and announcing that someone greater was coming.

Who was this man? What did his appearance mean? Whom should Micah believe?

The three voices had become many voices. They were no longer an essay, a prayer, and a poem. They were a mother, a father, a neighbor, a traveler, a teacher, a frightened villager, and a prophet crying in the wilderness. Each voice entered Micah’s consciousness and helped shape the man he was becoming.

Later, reading Dorothy Sayers showed me another way this could be done. She allowed Herod, the wise men, Mary, Joseph, and others to inhabit the same events from within their own minds. They did not merely report what had happened. They revealed what the events looked like from where each of them stood.

By then, however, the instinct had already entered my writing.

A study of Exodus at DelCo Alliance returned me to a book I had recently studied at Pine Knolls in New York. Exodus began opening through the perspectives of Moses, Pharaoh, Israel, Egypt, and the generations that followed. That exploration became The Long Mercy.

Then came The People of Exile, centered in Babylon but asking whether exile is merely removal from one geographical place to another—or whether it describes something deeper in the human condition.

The Emmaus road opened yet another path. The risen Jesus began with Moses and the Prophets and showed two bewildered travelers how the Scriptures spoke of him. That led me toward an Emmaus journey through the entire Bible, seeking the one whom the words had been revealing all along.

These became long works—far removed in form from the original triptychs. Yet the triptychs had prepared me for them. They had taught me to approach one reality from more than one direction. Historical fiction taught me to listen from within the lives of people who could see only part of what was happening. The longer biblical works invited me to walk around great events and look through the eyes of those caught inside them.

I thought I was moving from one kind of writing to another. Only later did I recognize that each work had been preparing me to see the next.

There was no master plan. I did not sit down one morning and decide to create a body of work moving from devotional essays to triptychs, from triptychs to historical fiction, and from historical fiction to extended journeys through Scripture. One form presented itself. I followed it for a while. Then another path opened.

The form was never the gift itself. It was one way of receiving the gift.

I am still learning that lesson. I may write another triptych if the subject presents itself. I may return to Micah and listen more carefully to the voices surrounding him. The perspectives discovered in Sayers may deepen The Watcher, The Long Mercy, or the Emmaus journey. I do not know yet.

The work remains fluid. I remain unfinished. And, thankfully, the exploration is still fun.

I cannot manufacture what comes next. I can only remain attentive to it. My responsibility is not to command the work but to follow where it leads, to care for what has been entrusted to me, and to give it the most faithful form I can.

I am not the owner. I am but the curator.

Benediction — Go as One Who Belongs

Go now, not as one who possesses God, but as one who is possessed by him.

Go, not presuming that you have been preferred, but knowing that you have been entrusted.

May you never confuse chosenness with superiority, blessing with entitlement,
or belonging with ownership.

May the God of Israel and the God of the Gentiles, the God of those who recognize him
and the God of those who do not, enlarge your vision beyond the boundaries of your nation, your church, your tradition, and yourself.

May you recognize that your allegiance is exclusive, but his sovereignty is universal.

You are his alone. He is not yours alone.

When his calling frightens you, may you remember Moses.

When you feel too small, may you remember Jeremiah.

When you would rather flee, may you remember Jonah.

When the road requires courage, may you remember Joshua.

When you become conscious of your unworthiness, may you remember Isaiah.

And when you tremble beneath the weight of being chosen, may you remember that the purpose is his, the strength is his, the work is his, and you are his.

You have not chosen him to accompany you into your purposes.

He has chosen you to participate in his.

Go, then, as one blessed in order to bless, called in order to serve, and chosen in order to be sent.

Chosen for his purpose, not yours  …  Amen.