I believe – in fact I know – that God has a stunning life planned for you. Problem is that you and I have this amazing ability to work against Him and when we do that, we miss out. So, I’d love to share some practical, rubber-hits-the-road tips with you, for cooperating with God’s plans for your life. START LIVING YOUR GIG When I was young, finishing high school and making my career choices, I came very, very close to making a couple of major mistakes. I was blessed to be fairly academically inclined, so I basically had my choice of whatever university course my heart desired. There were three on my shortlist, medicine, law and an information technology degree. Now back in those days, medicine was by far the favoured career. It was seen as the pinnacle of achievement and certainly, my dad wanted me to study medicine. Law was right up there as well. Both of those professions appeared pretty much to guarantee a big income. This whole IT thing though was pretty new. The question was: which one to choose? As things turned out, I’d been accepted to train as an Army Officer, undertaking a four-year IT degree along the way, and I guess it was that sense of excitement of a military career which, as a young man, to be honest with you, swung me to that decision. As I look back on that choice, I thank God that I didn’t choose medicine or law. I can’t stand the sight of blood pretty much, which is not exactly the sort of prerequisite you want to have a career as a doctor. And the law, as I discovered later, is all about detail. Lots and lots and lots of detail, and whilst I can handle detail from time to time, it’s just not my first love. I would have ended up drowning in all the detail. I think back to that pivotal career decision that I made way back when I was just seventeen and a half years old, with not a lot of life experience to draw on exactly, and I shudder at how easily I could have chosen something that I just wasn’t suited to. I literally could have found myself living my life as a square peg in a round hole, and that I imagine, would be an incredibly uncomfortable position to find myself in. There’s a basic rule or life principle if you will, that goes something like this: square pegs belong in square holes, and round pegs, well … they belong in round holes. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out now do you? And yet, as I said at the beginning of the program, so many people are living life as a square peg in a round hole. A large survey conducted in the US not so long ago revealed that only 19% of workers were satisfied with their jobs; which means that 81% weren’t satisfied with their job. Of those, 16% were somewhat dissatisfied, and the rest were really unhappy. That’s pretty much Pareto’s 80/20 law right there, with the vast majority, the 80%, going to work unhappy. Another global survey found that over half, 56% of people, actually were looking to find a new job. Now, there can be a lot of reasons for those terrible statistics. Pay and conditions, poor management, they are just two. But if I were a betting man (which I am not), I would put money on the table that one of the major reasons is that people are doing jobs that they’re just not suited to do. You yourself know that there are some things in life that give you enormous satisfaction, and other things that leave you completely drained. Now that I’m getting older, I watch people who are grandparents. We have one couple who lives a few doors away on the same floor in our apartment block, who look after a different set of their grandchildren almost every day of the week, while their parents go to work. Other grandparents, they just can’t stand the thought of having to look after children, because it’s just not what they enjoy doing. They’ve brought up their own kids, and now they want a break from all that. And so wherever there is this mismatch between the requirements of a role and the natural motivations and talents and abilities of the individual – right there you have a square peg, in a round hole. And it’s generally not the hole that feels the pressure. The role is what the role is. The requirements of the position don’t change. It’s the individual who has to squeeze themselves into a role that they’re just not suited to. When I was at Bible College many years ago, the Principal of the College, Dr Barry Chant, made us memorise one particular Bible verse. In fact, he used to joke, although I’m not sure it was so much of a joke, that unless we were able to recite this one verse, we simply wouldn’t graduate from the College. At the time, I thought it was rather an odd choice of Bible verses. Why this one from among the 31,102 verses in the Bible? Well, here it is. Ephesians 2:10: For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do the good works which God prepared beforehand for us to walk into. The older and hopefully the wiser I’ve become since those days, the more I’ve discovered the wisdom of Barry’s insistence that we memorise this one verse. Because what it says, is that God made us; God handcrafted us; we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus and He made us, you and me, with a purpose in mind. He in fact made us in order to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to do, literally for us to walk into. So picture your life – this journey over hill and dale. Just as you turn round the next corner, or come over the next rise, waiting for you right there is one of the good works that God made you to do, one of the ones that He prepared before time even began for you to make happen. Now, do you imagine for one moment that God made a mistake? That He made you to do things that you weren’t good at doing? Or things that were impossible for you to do? Now way!! God knows exactly what He’s doing when He makes you. God knew, He handcrafted you to be a perfect fit to do what He made you to do. So why is it that we go and live a life we were never made to live? You see it all over the place, you see people going and trying to do jobs that they are simply not good at doing. There are so many jobs that if I chose to try and do them, I would ultimately be a failure at, because I simply wasn’t made to do them. Well sometimes its stubbornness, other times its ignorance, that’s why people do this. Or perhaps you’ve allowed circumstances to sweep you along in life, without ever taking a stand and saying to yourself: Hang on a minute; what I really want to do is … is this! My real dream in life is to go and be this and do that. The most common question I am asked when I talk on this, which I do rather a lot these days, because like Barry Chant I’ve come to believe that being the me I was meant to be is absolutely critical in life … the most common question I’m asked is this: How do I know what it is that God made me to do? Now that’s a fair question. Well, the answer is dead simple. Each one of us has something that gets us enthused in life, something that we’re passionate about. Something that we’re really good at, probably better at than anyone else that we know. For me it’s doing what I’m doing right now. I love to tell stories. I get up mostly at three or four o’clock in the morning to prepare these radio messages. Why? Not because I have to, but because I love to! I love telling stories; I love seeing people’s lives transformed through those stories. So let me ask you this: What are you passionate about? What do you absolutely love doing? What is it that you’re better at, than just about anybody else that you know? Maybe you love working with your hands and making things, or maybe you are great at looking after kids, or organising lots of detailed things, or … whatever it is that you are go...

Released on 1 May 2022