After driving off a mountainside around 7 AM near the Continental Divide in the Rockies at approximately 85 mph and crashing down down the mountain, end over end over end with no seatbelts on, my friend and I were more than a little surprised.
After all, we were both sleeping at the time of our untimely exit off the Trans Canada Highway. Unfortunately, I was also the driver who thought that the high speed of travel would help keep me awake, but I was wrong! My friend Dale had a couple cuts but I had not so much as a scratch or bruise.
It seemed that God had other plans for my life, but God was not in my equation. Neither of us were Christians. But that was soon to change.
Riding the Greyhound bus back from Revelstoke to Vancouver, B.C., a kindly gentleman upon hearing my story was the first to tell me that God must have a plan for my life.
I cringed at the idea of “religion”, but was highly intrigued about the possibility that God not only knew who I was, but had a work for me to do.
I was 17 years old at the time, and within weeks, humbly repented for living my life for me without regard for God and asked Him to forgive me and do what He wanted with me.
My life went through many twists and painful turns after that, much of it my own doing, but all the while I was aware of a sense of destiny I had yet to fulfill.
It was that sense of destiny, that God was not finished with me despite my failures, that kept me going through my darkest hours.
I will never forget the day at age 29, when I woke up on someone else’s couch, (I had lost both my homes) drove a borrowed car to downtown Vancouver (I had lost my Lincoln) and prayed that I could find a parking spot on a hill that no one could park in front of, so I could easily “push-start” that old heap of a borrowed car when I left.
It was a cool and crisp day that Vancouver morning. The incessant rain that routinely drenched the West Coast had lifted and the sun with its promise of warmth began to shine through. I stood in front of a chainlink fence that served as a temporary barrier to a new waterfront structure about to be built overlooking the deep and brooding Pacific Ocean.
As I stood in front of the fence, my fingers laced through the still wet and cold chain links, I felt like an imprisoned man who knew he had a destiny, but had no clue what it was, or when he would fulfill it.
Despite my desperate circumstances, I remember crying out to God, telling Him it felt like there was a weight, a physical weight, of destiny on my shoulders. It was both a burden I couldn’t shake and a desire I couldn’t reach.
But God was lovingly and tenderly directing my life when I was clueless to His providence. About three years later, after moving to Tennessee and later starting Hidden Manna Publishing, the notion of my destiny yet unfulfilled was still calling to me. It was unshakeable but still undefined.
As I poured over the Scriptures looking for clues as to my destiny, dozens of Scriptures galvanized for me that for the first time gave me something more than a gut feeling to stand on. I called it The Destiny Creed and had it framed in my office. It compiles Scriptures thematically and conversationally with such force and power that I had rarely felt. (If you would like a FREE download of The Destiny Creed, just follow this link. No email required.)
It was maybe two or three years later, when we were selling Hidden Manna Publishing to World Bible that Jesus came and stood by my bedside in the pre-dawn hours and explicitly told me that He still had a work for me to do that I knew not.
A visitation like that is not something you soon forget.
In some ways I felt like the salmon swimming tirelessly upstream, looking for that pristine mountain lake where God first dropped His sense of destiny into me. I didn’t know the way, but yet I was on my way.
How was that possible?
Something inside me, like a homing device, programmed by my Creator was leading me through every twist and turn, past thundering waterfalls and hungry predators. In those many moments of feeling lost and alone, facing what felt like an existential threat, I took hold of courage that found its way into my soul to the tune of Amazing Grace and specifically with that old refrain, “Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come… ’tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
If home was in part, finding and stepping into my destiny, I knew not the path towards it, but I knew it was as real as Heaven itself and I would find it. Not so much because of my relentless pursuit, but rather because He that promised is faithful and He promised to complete the work He began in me.
2023 will mark 50 years since God made me know He had a destiny for me to fulfill, but it was only this month that it came into full and clear view.
Don’t misunderstand me… The journey has been both harrowing and rewarding, and itself is inextricably tied to my destiny. Indeed, without the journey I would never have been able to peek over the horizon and finally see the work He planned all along for me to do.
I feel like a man standing on the Eastern shore who has been looking for and hastening (if that were possible) the rising of the coming sun. And now, while the sun still hides below the horizon, it has given away its position. Brilliant shafts of light proceed its entrance into the day, piercing the leftover storm clouds and boldly announcing the new day is about to begin.
And I… I stand with my feet on the shore…
And my spirit somehow stretches out across the ocean peaking over the horizon for a glimpse… just a glimpse of that beautiful sun bringing with it the revealing of God’s purposes and the announcing of His long planned destiny for my life at this time.
It is deeply tied, but not limited to the Jesus School of Business, that will soon reflect the light of God’s immutable counsel and unsearchable wisdom to a worldwide audience of God chasers, economic warriors and culture shapers, all of whom have their own deeply ingrained sense of destiny.
I am thankful you have journeyed this far with me and I hope you will walk further still. There is a work after all to be completed, that can only be done in the unity of faith, in the context of the challenges of life, whereupon we pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the cause of Christ who purchased us with His blood.
Please accept this Destiny Creed as a gift from the Father through me, to you.
If you haven’t already, please be sure to scroll down and add your name to the 15,000+ folks who are part of this courageous group of world changers who are in pursuit of God and His ways.
Until next time, I wish you a blessed and Christ filled Christmas!