In Search of God’s Point of View

June 2007

Dear Friends,

If you’re like Shirley and me, this time of year probably finds you shopping for graduation gifts. Whether it’s a member of your own family or perhaps the son or daughter of a co-worker or friend, most of us probably know at least one person who is graduating from high school, college, or graduate school this spring.

If that is true for you, I can suggest a gift that might be appropriate. It is a book I wrote for young people in one of those transitional periods. I called it, Life on the Edge, and it has sold more than one million copies. Here is an excerpt that will give you a feel for its content and approach. It might also speak to your heart.

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If you are between sixteen and twenty-six years of age, this book is written specifically for you. Others are welcome to read along with us, of course, but the ideas are aimed directly at those moving through what we will call the “critical decade.”

Some of the most dramatic and permanent changes in life usually occur during those ten short years. A person is transformed from a kid who’s still living at home and eating at the parents’ table, to a full-fledged adult who should be earning a living and taking complete charge of his or her life. Most of the decisions that will shape the next fifty years will be made in this era, including the choice of an occupation, perhaps the decision to marry, and the establishment of values and principles by which life will be governed.

What makes this period even more significant is the impact of early mistakes and errors in judgment. They can undermine all that is to follow. A bricklayer knows he must be very careful to get his foundation absolutely straight; any wobble in the bricks at the bottom will create an even greater tilt as the wall goes up. So it is in life.

One of the most important decisions to be made in the next few years will focus on a life’s work — an occupation — or a skill you hope to develop. That choice is often extremely difficult. How can you predict what you’ll want to be doing when you’re forty or fifty or sixty years old? You’re obligated to guess, based on very limited information. You may not even know what the work is really like, yet you enroll yourself in a lengthy academic program to train for it.

The decisions you make under those circumstances may lock you into something you will later hate. And there are social pressures that influence your choices. For example, many young women secretly want to be wives and mothers, but are afraid to admit it in today’s “liberated” society. Furthermore, how can a girl plan to do something that requires the participation of another person — a husband who will be worthy of loving her and living with her for the rest of her life? Marriage may or may not be in the picture for her. Yes, there’s plenty to consider in the critical decade.

I feel very fortunate to have stumbled into a profession when I was young that I have been able to do reasonably well. If I had been born in Jesus’ time and had been required to earn a living with my hands, perhaps in carpentry or stonemasonry, I would have probably starved to death. I can see myself sitting outside the temple in Jerusalem with a sign that read, “Will work for food.” Craftsmanship is just not in my nature. I earned my only high school D in woodworking class, and that was a gift from my teacher, Mr. Peterson. I spent an entire semester trying to make a box in which to store shoeshine stuff. What a waste! At least that experience helped me rule out a few occupational possibilities. Carpentry and cabinetry were two of them.

Things to Consider When Choosing a Profession

You’ll have to rule some things in and out, too. Indeed, to make an informed decision about a profession, you’ll need to get six essential components together, as follows:

1. It must be something you genuinely like to do. This choice requires you to identify your own strengths, weaknesses and interests. (Some excellent psychometric tests are available to help with this need.)
2. It must be something you have the ability to do. You might want to be an attorney but lack the talent to do the academic work and pass the bar examination.
3. It must be something you can earn a living by doing. You might want to be an artist, but if people don’t buy your paintings, you could starve while sitting at your easel.
4. It must be something you are permitted to do. You might make a wonderful physician and could handle the training but can’t gain entrance to medical school. I went through a Ph.D. program in graduate school with a fellow student who was washed out after seven years of classwork. He made it to the last big exam before his professors told him, “You’re out.”
5. It must be something that brings cultural affirmation. In other words, most people need to feel some measure of respect from their contemporaries for what they do. This is one reason women have found it difficult to stay home and raise their children.
6. Most importantly for the genuine believer, it must be something that you feel God approves of. How do you determine the will of God about so personal a decision? That is a critical matter we’ll discuss presently.

What makes it so tough to choose an occupation is that all six of these requirements must be met at the same time. If you get five of them down but you don’t like what you have selected, you’re in trouble. If you get five together but are rejected by the required professional schools, you are blocked. If you get five lined up but you can’t earn a living at the job of your choice, the system fails. Every link in the chain must connect.

Given this challenge, it isn’t surprising that so many young people flounder during the critical decade. They become immobilized for years not knowing what to do next. They sit around their parents’ house plunking on a guitar and waiting for a dish to rattle in the kitchen.

Young adults in this situation remind me of rockets sitting on the launch pad. Their engines are roaring and belching smoke and fire, but nothing moves. The spacecraft was made to blast its way through the stratosphere, but there it sits as if bolted to the pad. I’ve met many men and women in their early twenties whose rockets just would not lift them off the ground. And yes, I’ve known a few whose engines blew up and scattered the debris of broken dreams all over the launch pad.

The mission sometimes fails because an individual refuses to include God in his lofty plans. The psalmist wrote, “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stand guard in vain” (Psalm 127:1, NIV). Those words offer incredible meaning for those of you who are just getting started in life. Whatever you try to do, whether it is to build or defend, will be useless if you do it in your own strength. That may sound very old fashioned, but I promise you it is true. Furthermore, the Lord will not settle for second place in your life.

Lessons From My Father

My father thought he would be an exception to that principle. He had his life laid out, and he needed no help from God or anyone else in fulfilling it. From his earliest childhood, Dad knew he wanted to be a great artist. Even before kindergarten, he told his family he intended to draw and paint when he grew up. This passion was not simply a choice he had made. It was in his blood. All through childhood and his teen years, he never wavered from this desire to become another Rembrandt or Michelangelo. While his five brothers were uncertain about what they wanted to be, this youngest among them was chasing a lofty dream.

Then one day as he walked along a street during his sixteenth year, he seemed to hear the Lord speaking to him. It was not an audible voice, of course. But deep within his being he knew he had been addressed by the Almighty. It was a simple message that conveyed this thought: I want you to set aside your great ambition to be an artist and prepare for a life of service in the ministry.

My father was terrified by the experience. He replied, “No! No, Lord. You know I have my plans all made and art is my consuming interest.” He quickly argued down the impression and convinced himself that his mind had deceived him. But when he got it all resolved and laid to rest, it would reappear. Month after month, the nagging thought reverberated in his mind that God was asking — no, demanding — that he abandon his dream and become a preacher. It proved to be one of the greatest struggles of his life, but he shared it with no one.

For two years this inner battle went on. Then toward the end of his senior year in high school, the time came for him to select a college to attend in the fall. His father told him to pick out any school in the country and he would send him there. But what was he to do? If he yielded to the voice within, he would have to attend a college that would begin preparing him for the ministry. But if he followed his dream, he would go to art school. Would he obey God, or would he have his own way? It was a terrible dilemma.

One morning a few weeks before graduation, he got out of bed to prepare for school. But the minute his feet touched the floor, my father heard the voice again. It was as if the Lord said, “Today you will have to make up your mind.” He wrestled with that issue all day at school but still shared his turmoil with no one. After his last class in mid-afternoon, he came home to an empty house. He paced back and forth in the living room, praying and struggling with this unrelenting demand of God. Finally, in an act of defiance, he suddenly turned his face upward and said, “It’s too great a price, and I won’t pay it!”

My father later described that moment as the most terrible experience of his life. He said the Spirit of the Lord seemed to leave him as one person would walk away from another. He was still shaken and pale when his mother came home a few minutes later. She could see his distress, and she asked him what was wrong.

“You won’t understand this, Mom” said the boy who was to become my dad, “but God has been asking me to give up my plans to be an artist. He wants me to become a minister. I don’t want to do it. And I won’t do it. I’ve just said no to Him, and He’s gone.”

My grandmother was a very righteous woman who could always touch the heart of God in her prayers. She said, “Oh, Honey, you’re just emotional. Let’s pray about it.”

They got down on their knees, and my grandmother began talking to the Lord about her son. Then she stopped in mid-sentence. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “Something is wrong.”

“You don’t understand it,” said my father, “but I do. I’ve just refused to obey God, and He’s gone.”

It would be seven long years before my father would hear the voice of the Lord again. You see, his love of art had become his god. It mattered more to him than anything on earth and even outranked his relationship with the Father. That’s what was going on in his heart. There was nothing sinful or immoral in his love of art. The problem was that God had no place in it.

In the next few days, my father chose the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (AIP), one of the best art schools in the country. He enrolled there in the fall, and his professors immediately recognized his unusual talent. Indeed, when he graduated, he was honored as the most gifted student in his class. But as he was walking down the aisle to the platform where a big NUMBER ONE banner had been draped on his paintings, the scripture again came into his mind: “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain” (Psalm 127:1, NIV).

My father graduated and went out to begin his great career in the field of art. Unfortunately, the Great Depression was underway in the United States and in most countries around the world. That was a scary time in American history when huge numbers of people were out of work. Businesses failed, banks closed, and opportunities were few and far between. My dad was one of the millions who couldn’t find a job of any type — much less one in this chosen profession. He was finally hired at a Texaco service station to pump gas and wipe the windshields of cars. It was pretty humbling for a man who wanted to be another Leonardo da Vinci.

Here is the most incredible part of the story. Right at that moment when my dad was desperate for a career break, the president of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh wrote him a letter and offered him a job as an instructor at the unbelievable salary of three hundred dollars per month! It was precisely what he had dreamed about since childhood. But somehow that letter became lost on the president’s desk. The man later found and mailed it with another note saying he had wondered why my dad hadn’t even done him the courtesy of responding to his offer. But by the time the second letter came, my father had grown sick of himself and his lofty plans. He had found a place of prayer and yielded himself completely to the call of God on his life. So by the time the job offer came, he wrote back to say, “Thanks, but I’m no longer interested.”

When Everything Turns on One Decision

My dad’s future, and undoubtedly mine, hung in the balance at that critical juncture. If he had received the original offer from the president of AIP, he would have been launched on a career that was obviously out of the will of God. Who knows how his life would have changed if he had “labored in vain” in the wrong vineyard? What prevented him from making the mistake of his life? Well, my grandmother was out there praying for him every day, asking the Lord to draw her youngest son back to Himself. I believe God answered her prayers by interfering with the delivery of the letter on which everything seemed to depend.

Does it seem cruel of the Lord to deprive this young man of the one thing he most wanted? Good question! Why would God give him remarkable ability and then prevent him from using it? Well, as is always the case in His dealings with us, the Lord had my father’s best interests at heart. And He took nothing away from him.

As soon as my dad yielded to the will of the Lord, his art was given back to him. He then used his talent in ministerial work all his life, and when he died he was chairman of the art department at a Christian college. He left beautiful paintings and sculptures all over the United States. More importantly, thousands of people came to know Jesus Christ through the preaching ministry of my father. They will be in heaven because of the calling that was on his life.

So the terrible struggle that occurred in my father’s teen years was not a cruel manipulation. It was a vitally important test of his commitment — a challenge to put God in first place. And because he passed that test, I am here writing to you today!

Jesus Christ will ask you to put Him in first place, too. He will be Lord of all, or not Lord at all. That does not mean you will be required to become a minister. Your calling will be unique. But I am certain that anything done selfishly and independent of His purposes will not satisfy you and will ultimately be done “in vain.”

We’ll talk about how to interpret the will of God and recognize His purposes in a later discussion. For now, we must set about the task of thinking through the challenges you are facing. A contractor would never begin a skyscraper without detailed architectural and engineering plans to guide his work. Likewise, persons in the critical decade between ages sixteen and twenty-six owe it to their future to figure out who they are and what they want out of life. Helping you do that is what this book is all about.

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That was the first chapter of Life on the Edge. If you think the book would be helpful to a young person in your family or among your friends, you can obtain a copy from Focus on the Family or from any bookstore. Frankly, I wish I had had a copy of it when I was graduating from high school. It could have pointed me in the direction I eventually discovered for myself. My ultimate purpose in writing this book, of course, was to urge the young to let God be God, and to follow His biblical precepts and principles. That is a prescription for success throughout life.

In closing let me say that Focus on the Family continues to be in need of your financial assistance. Anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.

Have a great summer.

Sincerely,

James C. Dobson, Ph.D.
Founder and Chairman