I am not one who is a stranger to questioning my own identity. The truth is, I have rediscovered myself about as many times as politicians tell lies. However, they haven’t really been as much rediscovering as discovering more… more about myself and how God really made me.

For the first eighteen years of my life it seemed my destiny to be an artist. I drew, I painted… I figured that was my purpose in life. God turned my heart, though, and showed me avenues I never realized were open to me. He told me, quite clearly, that I was to do his work on earth.

“Ministry, God? How can I be a minister… I don’t even speak well in front of people. I’m quite an introvert. How can you use me to minister to people?”

God knew what he was doing, though. Through my first years in college, and to this day he has changed me so much I can hardly recognize myself. I am not an introvert, anymore. I can and have spoke in front of people, and I have been learning ever much more from and about God’s word.

Meanwhile, the other thing I have done my entire life has come to the forefront, also: my ability to communicate through the written word. I cannot ever quit writing. When all else fails, my ability to write has communicated my heart better than any medium in the world… even my artwork. My passion, in the end, is composing words… into anything from swiftly woven narratives to deep, passionate dwellings on the living God. An old passion akin to this has been rekindled as well, in large part due to a new friend coming into my life: the composing of scripts for stage and screen. Perhaps giving the plotting of films a second go might just be my thing.

All of these things have raced through my mind recently. It isn’t the first time.  So, I’ve prayed. I ask God, “Just who am I? Am I an artist, a minister, a writer, a filmmaker, a visionary…. what?”

“Why not all? I gave you your talents for a purpose,” he seems to reply. “You can use them all to serve me. I mean to do great things through you. Trust me.”

It is hard. It is hard to submit to God. But it becomes easier every day, just seeing what he has given me, where I have been, and where he has brought me so far.  God keeps telling me, and it becomes day-by-day surrender to his will, not knowing where I’m going, but knowing he will get me there.  Trust God.