Designed to Worship

I own several soundtracks, even the kind with the scores. The story rises and falls with the crescendos and quiet lulls. My roommates and I wore out the Gettysburg soundtrack during study hours in my junior-year dorm room. Composers intrigue me—how they weave a theme through different scenes . . . and more importantly how they incorporate so many sounds and their necessary instruments. I don’t know how many times I’ve asked myself, “Did he just hear a [insert instrument] here or what?” It fits, and sometimes fits so well that the sound wouldn’t work without it.
Our Imprints video last night emphasized playing our instrument with gusto as part of the soundtrack of human history—instruments of our talents and time, special places and opportunities. It was a validation of what I’ve long felt: that God uses lay people and tradesmen to accomplish many of the various tasks of his kingdom.
When I was in college, chapel speakers used to address us, “Preachers, teachers, missionaries, or whatever God has called you to do.” Sometimes, they even through in nurses and engineers. Graphic designers fell farther down the list, I guess. Then my senior year, an administrator told us that the college aimed to place us not in secular workforces but ministry design studios (there’s so many of those in the world). Right then and there, I determined to prove to my fundamentalist guilt and the legalists looking down their noses that I could be a light with a laptop.
But it was like I was trying to excuse my choice of not being a pastor, a thought many preachers’ sons probably struggle to extinguish. I enjoy design and writing. I just assumed growing up that the higher echelon of Christians all had talents they had to abandon to be vocational ministers. Athletes get lauded for walking away from their respective games for the pulpit; so do then-wealthy business professionals, etc. I don’t doubt their calls. Sometimes, my secular work has made me wonder about mine,though.
Louie Giglio, the video speaker, affirmed that God uses us with our passions and strengths, if not for our passions and strengths. He doesn’t judge us on what we do (unless it takes from his glory) but how we do—whatever we do. There’s no sin in eating and working. Paul made tents. Solomon ran a country. Onesimus served as a slave. And almost everybody in the New Testament seemed to spend a significant time fishing.
Our vocations, even doing them well for his glory, do not excuse us from evangelism, service, and influence. But they need not be shadows that cast us into second class heaven citizenship. When we realize that everything we do falls into worship of self or worship of God, we’re challenged to complete even our perfunctory tasks with the passion in which we sing in church—and to give God the credit for what we accomplish in that spirit. That’s a tall task, not far off from sinlessness. But according to Romans 12:1, it’s the least we can do in light of what he did for us.
His life and sacrifice happened so far ago in so foreign of a culture. The full benefits of his mercy are so ahead in the ambiguous future. I find it difficult to psyche myself up with gratitude—not because I think small of Jesus but because I think so much of me. I think God keeps putting me through frustrating tests to get me to cry uncle, to recognize I need him—not just once for my pass to heaven but also for the daily ability to worship him through my talents and contacts and opportunities.